How much hd capacity?

[bluey9]

I'm new to this and trying to put some old vhs onto vcd. I want to buy a video capture device and was thinking of the wintv usb or similar. I have a pentium 3 500mhz pc and approx 6.5gb left on my hd. How much video could I capture with this and will I have to buy a bigger hd. Any info on this would be much appreciated.
Cheers
Bluey

[KingJohn]

Hi

I have a P3, 450 not upgraded anthing as Im changing to a P4, but anyway I capture full movies using Divx, that does not need much room at all, you have plenty for that. Around 400Mb or so, then converting to Mpeg will take some 1Gb or so, if you had a second drive that would be used for this work instead of messing drive c up all the time I also have some small 2G Scuzzy that can be used, but not used much.

Hard drive speed is important also. But maybe you should see what you can do with your present system.

Start saving in normal AVI's and you will need a lot more room, same for ripping DVD's.

I have a total size of 6Gb on one hard drive which is plenty for low quality movies, start off with those and see what your system can do before you dash out a buy a 60Gb drive.

[bluey9]

Thanks for that. It helps to get some good news. What type of video capture card would capture in divx (what's that, I'm not familiar with it, heard of it but don't know anything about it). The more inexpensive the better.
Many Thanks Again
Bluey

[jeex]

the easiest solution for capturing to vcd would be to buy an ati all-in-wonder card.. video card, video capture, video tuner, & tv out. you could capture straight to vcd format, but the quality isnt that good..

but if all you're trying to do is convert old vhs tapes to vcd, i'd suggest the pinnacle dc10+. you'd have to convert from mjpeg to vcd, but the results yeilded would be superiour to anything the ati aiw could provide.

i'm sure someone else will reply, but i'm just throwing in my 2 cents from what i've used..

[KingJohn]

Hi

Well I don't think there are any brilliant ones out there yet. I was thinking of getting rid of my capture/tv card and graphics card and buying the ATI all in wonder radion, but for the price they are asking and from what I have heard they are simply not worth it. I have always had ATI graphic cards, and I doubt if I will ever change, but the new one needs to be improved or come down in price quite a lot.

I use a cheap $50 WinTV card, and for the price its very good. Capture the TV or feed AVI into it. However with a P3 450 its not possible to capture uncompressed video without loosing a lot of frames, so I use DivX and there is no problem. All the codec's you have on your system should be available for you to chose, if your hard drive is faster than mine, or a few other things better then you may be able to do a whole lot more.

The ATI card in the UK is £230 OEM, for that I would expect something a lot better, but its good at other things like games etc, but anyway I would suggest you start off with a cheap card and see what can be done.

take a look at this http://www.hauppauge.com/html/avi_cap.htm