Couple Of Questions

[Bureau2]

hey, i'm kinda a newbie at this whole world but know enough to get by but i have a few questions that i hope someone can answer, just if anyone knows the answer to any of the below it would be greatly appreciated...

i] i have a tv card, that's all i know about it, i can launch it, get it working and stuff but everytime i close it, or restart my pc i have to reinstall the whole program as it crashes..... is this normal or does anyone know why?

ii] when i start to record videos through my tv card software/virtuadub/avi_oi it works ok and that but when i try to put the cmopressor as 'divx' it crashes, the whole pc crashes... i've reinstalled different version of divx and eveything but still i'm stuck and it crashes... i only have about 7 gigs of free harddrive space so i'd like to use DivX...

iii] can you get other software to use to operate your tv card rather than the one that came with it? like a third parrty one or soemthing because today my tv card software isn't wanting to launch itself, or if i does it takes about 30 minutes to do so... even if i reinstall it a few times... my pc's failry new and good so why that happens i'm not too sure...

if anyone has any ideas to any of these questions please reply...

thanks in advance for your time....

[Gazorgan]

i] Not normal, but it has been posted on before. "That's all I know about it" means your stuck until you do know somehting about it. You most likely need new/updated drivers. The ones on the CD invariably suck (not in a good way). Find out what type of card, and update your drivers.

ii] It will crash. Unless you have a 3 GHz processor, your aren't going to capture in realtime DivX in any high resolution. Try lowering your capture resolution to 320x240 maximum, and audio to PCM (not mp3). Same thing for mp3 audio instead of PCM, encoding mp3's takes overhead. For me, 7 GB is good for maybe 20-30 minutes of capture. Ouch, right? Try capturing in MPEG1 or VCD resolution. This gives you a pretty good quality/size trade off. Your display mode makes a difference, if you use overlay, it's not sucking down CPU cycles like it would if you have to process the video to see it.

iii] Power VCR and IUVCR, both in the downlad section of this site. Both have a free 30 day trial. Power VCR is a petty good application, but limited to MPEG1/MPEG2. It has a pretty good timed record section. IUVCR can record any resolution and any format, but is not very intuitive in it's use. It's also written by Europeons, and has a definate PAL attitude to it.

[Bureau2]

wow thanks so much that was really helpful and cleared up a lot of questions i had, it's a 878TV tv card software thing using a Brooketree something [i'd need to restart the pc to see it as it's crashed again] but thanks for the help it's a major step forward for me understanding this....

would i please be able to ask for your help on one last thing... i was wondering, is there anyway to capture video into a vcd/mpg or anything rather than a big huge avi? i've tried codecs and stuff but i either get awful quality or awful frame rates....