CPU Utilization -- Emuzed Maui III + MovieMill

[jbodin]

I recently obtained an Emuzed Maui III-G card -- it installed on my Windows 2000 Professional system just fine (Athlon XP 1800+ processor, 768 MB RAM, 128 MB Radeon 9700 Pro video card, etc.), and after installing MovieMill, I was up-and-running in absolutely no time with no muss, no fuss, and no bother. Given the ease of installation and the capture quality, it's already an improvement over my old AITech NetTV-98 card and the Cyberlink PoweVCR II capture setup I was using.

One thing I noticed, though, is that my CPU utilization is still higher than I would have expected, given that the Maui III does hardware-based MPEG encoding -- I expected MUCH less load on my CPU, but I'm still noticing about 50% utilization while viewing TV using MovieMill, and a bit more than that when actually capturing. I haven't tried disabling the preview in MovieMill to see what effect that will have on my CPU utilization, but I plan on doing so tonight.

Anyway, all that said, I wondered what type of CPU utilization other folks were experiencing with the Emuzed Maui III card using MovieMill as the capture program? In reading through the MovieMill Product Overview literature, I noticed that under the "Capture" section it indicates the following:

Preview in a window or full screen. Preview is implemented by means of a real time software decoder included in the bundle.

Does this mean that MovieMill isn't using the "Overlay" mode to display the preview? I did some testing on this and when I disable the preview while doing a video capture with MovieMill, my CPU utilization does drop down into the 2% - 5% range, which I would guess should be low enough to allow me to surf the web, edit video, etc., while simultaneously doing captures without incurring the wrath of lost/dropped frames and such.

Anybody got any tips, advice, or other experience regarding the Emuzed Maui III card and the MovieMill software? Any tips on configuring MovieMill? I haven't seen any options so far on how to do MPEG-1 captures for VCD-quality videos . . . just MPEG-2 DVD and SVCD options so far, for example (the MPEG-1 and VCD options are there, but they're grayed-out).

Thanks in advance from a MovieMill and Maui III noob!

[SHS]

hardware-based MPEG encoding only in encoding not decoding so there for you have CPU utilization becuases none today video card have REAL hardware decoding.