ATI Rage Fury Pro-compatibility with virtualdub wrapper=good

[menaz]

This is the current setup that I have, I just built this system after getting rid of my old Celeron. BTW, yes this post is related to the ATI RFP

Pentium 1.3
128rdram
Jaton Nvidia tnt2 vanta 16mb agp
Hauppauge Wintv go
40gb ibm deskstar

The agp card was $30 and the wintv was $40. Now, I can get a rage fury pro for $40, that can capture video and has the tv out. I could really use the extra $30 to get a cheapo DVD player to rip DVD's.

Here is my problem. I just made my first VCD, and I was actually very pleased with the quality. I captured with virtualdub with noise reduction enabled, 640x480 and used picvideoand then after cutting out commercials I frameserved to tmpgenc. The entire 1hr28min file was 888mb. I was happy

I want to take back the hauppauge card and the jaton card so I can buy the ATI RFP

Now, I am afraid that I would be going against my belief of "if it aint broke dont fix it." And mess up something good.

Will the ATI, using the wrapper produce the same results as the hauppauge? Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

The RFP gives me an extra 16mb of RAM. not unless that will help out with the encoding or any other aspect of my computer (other than gaming, im not a gamer)I can care less about that.

[humdinger]

hi,i have a rfp,and i should say that i really dont recommend it. u dont say what os u use, but i cannot get mine to run under win2k. it seems to run okl under win98, but i have never managed to get the wrapper working with virtual dub, and the card seems to find macrovision on any signal i put in, even from my camcorder! this means i cant capture any more than 30secs without it getting stuck in a continual loop. i had to get a seperate box which works inline to remove the macrovision. the realtime mpg capture isnt all that either, the only good captures i've managed to achieve is with the mmc which come with it and capturing to avi. that sed, its only what has happened in my experiance, and others might think this card is really gr8. basically you get what you pay for.......

[Dman65]

I have a Rage Fury Pro and the wrappers have worked for me. I have been able to capture in VirtualDub though most of my capturing is done from a program I wrote based on the Microsoft VidCap32 program. I have just added a scheduling function to it so i can schedule it to record from my DirecTV system. My capturing is all realtime MPEG4 though. I have not experiemnted with any VC creation as of yet.

In addition the video output of the Rage Fury Pro is pretty good as well compared to the budget scan converters I have used.

One caveat, I am using a 500mhz Pentium III right now. I was never able to get the Rage Fury Pro working in capture mode with the AMD K6 2-500 I had.

[menaz]

Im using windows 98 right but sometime this week I will change to ME. I kind of figured it was too good to be true for that price.

[humdinger]

dman65, could you give me a complete rundown on your setup? if you could help me improve my capture experiance i'd b very gr8ful

[Dman65]

My System is as follows:

Pentium III 500 mhz (not overclocked)
128 MB Ram
4 GB System Hard Drive
13 GB Capture Hard Drive (ATA 66 7200 RPM)
30 GB Storage Hard Drive (ATA 66 7200 RPM)
Windows 98
CompUSA PCI soundcard (my weakest link)
Rage Fury Pro 128

I am using the ATI Beta Drivers and the wrapper.

There is nothing else in my machine except the standard motherboard accompaniment of 2 serial ports, 1 parallel port and 2 USB ports. Nothing is connected to any of them. This machine is totally dedicated to capture.

I do have one problem in that I am unable to use the MMC 7.1 Video in function. It worked the first time I used it, but every time since then it gives me a "blue screen of death." I have not really looked into fixing this since I find using my own custom program and the MPEG4 CODEC works better and is easier to use.

I did try capturing 640x480 once and was able to do so with my ATA66 7200RPM hard drive.

[humdinger]

could i be really cheeky and ask you if i could try your custom program? i have a t'bird 1ghz, 30gb 72000rpm os drive and a 40gb 72000rpm capture drive and 256mb ram. i'm fairly certain this is beefy enuff for what i wanna do (backup old vcrs and the occasional simpsons off cable) ive installed the wrapper, and it even tells me it's copying the files accross, but i still can't use any vfw proggy. any help would be greatly appretiated. especially as MMC has started telling me i havent got enuff disk space to store a 15mb file when i have 30gb free....
thanks

[menaz]

So should I keep what I have

[humdinger]

keep what you have and save up for sonic foundry vegas video2.0.
i love this prog

[Gator]

ATI has released final versions of the W2K drivers (including the 7.1 MMC).

I upgraded my old BETA drivers for my TV-Wonder and it improved the stability greatly.

perhaps it will for you too..

ATI Drivers for the RFP

[frazzled]

I agree with Humdinger about Vegas, I have the stripped version (VideoFactory) and it's a great program. Oh, you may not have to save too long for it, it's $149 at http://www.BestBuy.com, that's a dynamite price.

Oh, and Humdinger...go check out the Sonic Foundry website, the new version of Video Factory apparently has a new vidcap program (2.5) that is supposed to be much better and they've made it available to Vegas 2.0 owners (just download the VideoFactory 2.0 demo).

fraz

[humdinger]

yeah, i got the capture prog, and its really great. much better than the MMC the only niggle if ound with vegas is that you have to pay extra for the mpg encoder, which after forking out for i found was actually pretty crappy. it takes much longer to encode than tmpeg, and the results are inferior. mind you i've got round this because i found that vegas will output segmented avi's which can be loaded into virtualdub and frameserved to tmpeg, which works great for me if only there were a framserve option or plugin for vegas.......

[frazzled]

Hey! That's a good idea about the segmented AVIs. I haven't really started working with these tools *seriously*, but I had noted that the mpeg encoder with VideoFactory did a lousy job (couldn't play the files on my iPaq while Tmpeg did fine). My eventual goal is to make VCDs from VHS tapes, VirtualDub is supposed to be problematic with my card + OS (Radeon VIVO + win2K) when it comes to capture, but your approach might do the trick.
Thanks! Oh, and it may be worth it to mention the frameserve issue on the Vegas forums...rumor has it that they are working on Vegas 3.

regards,

fraz

[Dman65]

Hello Humdinger,

If you download the VidCap32 program that is Microsoft's sample program from the VFW kit you will have the capture portion of my program. All I have done is add a scheduling feature to that program as well as some serial port code to change the channel on my DirecTV receiver.