Dual cpu's for video capturing?

[blownonfuel]

Hello i'm a newbie so please bare with me. My computer blew the power supply and took out everything with it,and i do mean everything. So i'm in the process of building a new one. The question i have is,i'm trying to convert all my vhs tapes to vcd.I had very little success with my old computer(AMD k62 500 mhz,64 megs of ram,13 gig western dig. h.d.) and creatives analog to digital bridge.The vcds looked very "blocky" lots of artifacts.So from what ive read it seems a dual cpu system with lots of ram would help the problems that i had.Would this be the best,or would a fast single cpu do the job?I just want to get all my old home movies from vhs to vcd without losing any picture quality. Any help would be great.THANKS TO ALL.

[HillJack]

CPU power has no direct effect on the quality of your finished product. A faster CPU will effect how long the encoding takes though, but a P1-200 taking 2 days to encode a video will produce the same results as a P4-2400 taking 2 hours.

The only thing it could possibly help with is enabling you to capture at higher resolutions (assuming your video-card can handle it).

[blownonfuel]

Thank you for the info Hilljack . Can you recomend a good capture card.

[MarkLV]

CPU power has no direct effect on the quality of your finished product. A faster CPU will effect how long the encoding takes though, but a P1-200 taking 2 days to encode a video will produce the same results as a P4-2400 taking 2 hours.

This is correct only if you capture into uncompressed AVI and encode
captured AVI after.
This method requires a lot of disk space and has
many annoying issues: audio/video syncronization, AVI file size
limitations and so on.
If you try to save disk/time or work around mentioned issues by using
real-time software encoding during capturing (i.e. capture into
compressed AVI or MPEG), in terms of resulting quality, CPU power
become bottle neck as well as resolution/color/frame rate capabilities of
capturing card.

So from what ive read it seems a dual cpu system with lots of ram would help the problems that i had.Would this be the best,or would a fast single cpu do the job

Once again, previous post is correct if you won't use real-time
recompression, but if you will, the answer depends on software (codec)
that you will use, because it may be optimized for dual cpu or not.
Without special optimization of the codec, better results may be achived
by a single faster cpu than by couple of slower ones.

[blownonfuel]

Thank you Marklv for the info. If you were in my shoes and were going to build a new system,what would you build? What cpu,ram,h.d.,capturing device,etc. I'm converting my vhs tapes into vcds. Thanks again.

[Mirror_Image]

An approximate budget for the project would be very helpful.

[monsoon01]

well if you have about 4 or 5 grand to spend i have an idea of a system that would be great for capturing:

·2 2Ghz Athlon MPs
·512MB PC2100 DDR(or PC2700, what you want)
·2(possibly more) SCSI3 Ultra wide(capture at full res. with no frame drops)
·Santa Cruz Turtle Beach 6 Channel Sound card(no issues like Sound Blasters)
·A big server case with a big power supply (500W?)

and then all your DVD-ROMS and CD-RWs and whatever else you want, if that sounds a bit much to build i can direct you to a site that does custom computers for pretty cheap.....

(this set up kinda makes me drool )

[ktnwin]

If I have just one grand, I would buy the DVD recorder (set top box). Then I connect my VCR to that DVD recoder, insert in a blank DVD-R, push PLAY on the VCR and RECORD on the DVD recorder.
I will end up with good quality DVD discs.
He'He'

[MarkLV]

Thank you Marklv for the info. If you were in my shoes and were going to build a new system,what would you build? What cpu,ram,h.d.,capturing device,etc. I'm converting my vhs tapes into vcds. Thanks again.

The following configuration should be enough to convert VHS tapes
into VCD:

CPU: any modern CPU (P3/CELERON/P4/ATHLON/DURON) from 1Ghz

RAM: 128MB

H.D.: any modern UDMA 7200rpm disk; size depends on method that
you will use to create your VCDs:
on-line capture into VCD MPEG - a few gigs;
capture into AVI and off-line encoding into MPEG - tens gigs.

CAPTURE DEVICE: any chip BT8x8 based PCI card. If your VCR has
S-Video out, take card with S-Video in - better quality. For example,
ATI TV WONDER (with S-Video in) or ATI TV WONDER VE (without).

Do not forget good drivers/software bundle (may be more important
than hardware)

BUT !!!

In terms of quality, I do not recommend to convert VHS tapes into VCDs.
With any hardware/software configuration your VCDs will look on TV or
computer screen OBVIOUSLY worse than original VHS tapes.
The bottle neck is VCD standard itself: too low bit rate.
I use another method to "digitize" and store my VHS tapes,
but it is not the subject of this topic.
If you want to continue this discussion, feel free to send me private message.