Have decided on AverTV Card. Just one question.

I have searched and searched for info on the ATI TV-Wonder and
the AverTV Stereo cards. I have decided on the AverTV.

Now, the only question is: With my system specs how well will it work?

PC:
CPU: K6-2 500MHz
Ram: 327meg
MB: FIC 503+
Video Card: Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
HD: 2 Western Digitals ( C is 7200, D is 5400)
Sound Card: SoundBlaster 16 ISA (I know, it's a dinosaur but it was free)

Any input is greatly appreciated!!

Thanks.

[gll99]

The card will not be the problem. You may have problems doing large framesize (resolution) and some slow codecs may drop frames because your system is a bit underpowered. My older system was K6 233 and one of my friends had a k6-2 366 and both had some problems using RGB24 mode and full 29.97 caps. We used YUY2 since its less taxing on the cpu. I found the divx4 codec (when it was set at it's fastest settings) to be really great and that helped. The other problem was that the processor sometimes locked on long captures caused by heat I guess. Extra cooling wouldn't hurt.

You have a bit more horsepower than we did so may not experience the same issues.

The point is that when we made certain concession we could capture pretty well within those limits.

Thank you gll99. I think that is the first time I have ever heard my system
stated as "having a bit more horsepower".

I plan on trying to use VDub to capture 30 minute TV shows. I'll try to
capture at the VCD standard of 352x240 straight to avi, then strip
the wave and re-encode with TMPGEnc. It will be fun to experiment with
the different settings.

BTW: I have heard of Huffy and YUY2, but, still being kind of a newbie,
are these codecs that I can access from VDub?

Thanks again!

P.S. I'll look up Huffy/YUY2 while I wait.

[gll99]

Compared to what I had before I would have thought you had a Cadillac.
Remember....As rich as he was Henry Ford never owned a Cadillac
Old one but goodie!!! Sorry bout that, I gotta get some sleep!!!

YUY2 or YUYV or YU?? or RGB24 are modes which you will be able to select from your card driver options. Although my card is an Avermedia it will be different than yours because it's older. I have a mode yu12 which actually is a compressed mode by itself. It's more to do with the way pixels and color depth are recorded.

Huffyuv is a freeware lossless codec that compresses a bit. It is better than uncompressed video in terms of space but you will still need a lot of disk space to use it. Incidently YUY2 mode will actually work faster with HUFFYUV since it will not require internal conversion.

You will find many tools and codecs like huffyuv on the left of this page.

Look at "Other"....then "TOOLS" and check all the tools and codecs out.

Make sure you get the DIVX codecs too because they are invaluable.

You may try some tricks later like I did when I started. If you are on the NTSV tv system then try capturing at 23.97 fps then you can try a vcd at that rate if it doesn't play ok at that rate then when you convert it to mpeg just convert the framerate to 29.97.

That way its easier on your system at capture time with less frames to capture and it's just as good on the eyes.

PS: In your case, there is no reason to strip the wav file from the avi.

You can input the avi directly into tmpgenc. It will have no trouble reading uncompressed pcm audio. You should probably avoid capturing compressed audio at the same time as video because it's cpu intensive and you will get dropped video frames which is something you want to avoid.

Enjoy!