Best Capturing for ATI TV Wonder PCI w/ 1ghz/512mb/100gb/W2K

[scottscomp]

Hi all. Please excuse the newbie questions but even though I'm a computer repair tech, I hardly know the first thing about the video capturing, encoding/decoding, VCDs, etc!

I recently purchased and installed an ATI TV Wonder PCI card in my Athlon T-Bird 1ghz, 512mb SDRAM, 100gb hard drive space Windows 2000 computer. I instantly realized the ATI capturing stuff wasn't very good, like I just read on these forums, so I used VirtualDub to capture a movie that was on the other night (2 hours). I ended up with a 20gb AVI file.

When I play the file, the audio/video are in sync in the beginning but by the end of the movie we are off by about 40 seconds, the audio is behind the video. What caused this?

Also while capturing in VirtualDub, I noticed that there were a LOT of "Frames Dropped", like over 100 in 20 seconds of capture. Is this normal?

I would explain the other settings I used but I'm not sure which ones you need to know. I don't have cable so I just captured off a pair of rabbit ears. In other words, I'm not really concerned about quality right now, I just want to get some experience doing this correctly.

I downloaded TMGP and used it to encode a few test files as mpg's and they worked out great - greatly reduced the disk space needed. I didn't try it on this 20gb file though because I suspect it'll take a long time.

Anything else I need to know? What did I miss? I really appreciate the help you guys give on this board!

-Scott
Scott's Computing

[MOVIEGEEK]

You can't judge ATI MMC by using rabbit ears(crap in...crap out).I
recommend you download MMC 7.6http://www.ati.com/support/driver.htmlIn O.S. put XP(I know you
use Win2000)and your hardware.It will work but some functions may be
disabled.