Concerning MJPEG capture...

[AiShaolinQuan]

I’m looking to get a capture card of some sort and was wondering about the specifics. I currently look to run this on an overclocked Celeron 850 running win2kpro.

I looked at the reviews but things seem to go wrong across multiple different cards. I read that the best way to capture without having to rip was to get a Hardware MJPEG card, and was recommended the Matrox Marvel but people seem to have problems with that card as well.

To be specific, I want to capture dvds and vhs at the highest quality possible. Is Hardware MJPEG the best way to do that in real time? What cards would people say does this best? And what software works best with this process if I plan to make vcds out of them or does the vcdhelp MJPEG capture guide answer that for me? Thnx to anyone who can help.

Stay FAR AWAY from the Matrox Marvels / Rainbow Runner G's if you are running Win2k! They don't support hardware MJpeg anymore!! Even when it was in the drivers it never worked properly...

Joe...

[AiShaolinQuan]

good to know, but that doesn't exactly answer my question...

I'm just looking for a Win2kPro compatible card that captures at the highest quality in realtime for things like dvds and vhs tapes. I read up on the reviews page and the Pinnacle DC30Plus/Pro seemed ok, but it was PCI. Is there a good AGP card out there? And is there one that handles graphics as well as capturing? Or is there no merit in going after MJPEG cards?

[PatMar]

be carefull with overclocked processors because video editing is the most difficult task for the system.
therefor it uses a lot of resources of your system what an overclocked processor cannot provide this.

PS DC30+ cards can work with Windows 2000 but this card can only capture images because the kernel of Windows 2000 is different then the kernel of Windows 95,98(SE) and ME.
therefor can the DC30+ sound part not work in the Windows 2000 Operating system.

I suggest if you want to use an Pinnacle card an DV500 video capture card with DV in-out and analog in-out.

[Shabubu]

Also capture cards are very senestive to overclocked processors as they usually use the system clock for timing information... So advice is set your clock to default when capping.

[N0SoopForU]

My advice would be to skip the hardware MJPEG boards and just use a regular BT878 card, like the WinTV go or WinTV FM and use the PICVideo MJPEG codec. You won't notice a difference in quality.

[FiEND]

overclocked celeron 466 @ 583 with hundreds of caps under my belt, overclocking si good!

and don't capture dvd, rip em and encode em, drives are cheap.

[AiShaolinQuan]

wow, thnx for all the info so far.

Well, my mobo is an older model so I can't really upgrade the processor just yet. I could just start it at default, or at least minimize the amount of resources used during capturing.

PatMar: The Dv500+ Seems a bit pricy...I'm also not exclusively thinking in terms of Pinnacle.

N0SoopForU and FiEND: So you are suggesting not doing MJPEG realtime capture? See, still, I'm talking time + quality, not one versus the other. I'd like to have the best of both worlds, and ripping seems to be a damn long way to do this when I could just capture the length of the movie and reencode, but I don't know how long that would take either, I have yet to do it.

So maybe to clarify, whats a pro and con list of ripping vs capturing and would MJPEG capturing still be the best way to go for speed and quality?

Thnx

[alkieman]

For speed and decent quality MJPEG is a good choice. However it is still a highly compressed format. Basically, each frame of video is encoded as if it was a single JPEG picture. This differs from MPEG where a group of frames are examined and redundant information thrown away during compression. It does mean however, that quality can sometimes suffer if you capture with MJPEG

[alkieman]

oops.. pressed enter by mistake.

What I was trying to say was that as MJPEG is already a compressed format so quality may suffer when encoding your final movie to MPEG. The HUFFYUV codec may be a better one to try but the compression isn't generally as good as MJPEG. Give MJPEG a try though, it may be more than an acceptable compromise but also try the HUFFYUV codec too, it's free.