Slow computer captures Avi just fine

[disturbed1]

For shits and giggles I dug into my box of computer crap and pieced together a slow system.

440bx slot1 MB
3 sticks of PC100 64mb ram
Slot1 PII 266
Trigent 4mb AGP video
Sound Blaster ISA
Realtek NIC
P Motion MJPEG capture card
Maxtor 20gig 5400rpm.
Windows Me OS.

The capture card was king back in the day. It's a knock off of a Bravado 2000. It does MJPEG upto 640x480 7000KB/S, RGB 16,24, and 32 bit. It's closest card available today is Pinnacle's DC10. Drivers were writen for Windows 95.

Problems-
No overlay is available. It locks the computer and forces a restart. Turning off the overlay everything works fine.

Had to modify the case, the card is 14" + long

Restricted data rate to 4500KB/S.
Because of the 5400RPM drive and or ATA33 interface.

I just captured about an hour with AVI_IO at 30 fps, 640x480 4500KB/S, 44.1KHZ uncompressed audio, without any frame drops.

[mrtristan]

That's pretty cool. Sure beats the guys who come on here with the best and brightest and can't even get their capturing to function.

[FulciLives]

I have an "old" second computer laying around and was thinking of buying a capture card for it but I figured it would only do a VCD resolution capture at best.

The computer is a SONY VAIO P3 650Mhz with 256MB running WinXP. It has a 30GB C drive (7200 I think not sure) and a second 80GB D drive (7200 for sure). I think the drives are using PIO MODE 4 or MODE 2 or something like that. I believe that is even slower than ATA/33 though I'm not sure. It has a crappy intel AGP 8MB video card built-in but I upgraded it to a 64MB ATI 7500 Radeon (there was no AGP slot for an upgrade).

Until recently this was my main computer. In fact I was thinking of taking out the 80GB drive for use in my new main computer. But now I'm thinking ...

Would this computer be able to handle a 640x480 capture with a TV tuner card (like the popular and favorite FlyVideo brand) or would I need something like the Pinnacle's DC10 which uses MJPEG. I know you can use a tuner TV capture card and use the MJPEG codec but doesn't the Pinnacle product have some sort of hardware acceleration built-in? If so then that could be why this very slow computer can capture at 640x480 if the P Motion MJPEG capture card also uses hardware acceleration.

I'm sure (without a doubt) that my new main computer can handle full screen or D1 resolution captures via a TV tuner card BUT I use it too often to "tie it up" with video capture. Would kinda be kewl if I could use that "old" Sony computer but I'm not willing to be stuck with a VCD resolution capture.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

For what it's worth I looked in the Device Manager and the Primary IDE channel says, "Ultra DMA mode 4" for Current Transfer mode and the Secondary IDE chanel says, "Ultra DMA mode 2" for Current Transfer mode. Both say "DMA if available" for Transfer Mode. What that means I have no clue hehehe

[disturbed1]

The capture card that I'm using here is hardware mjpeg.

About your PIO, open up control pannel and set the drives to DMA. You may also have to enable it in the computers BIOS.

You don't need a fast computer to capture. Capturing takes almost 0 cpu, it's taking 10% on my PII266. It's the encoding that takes CPU. Most cards have a built in compressor. Even the BT8x8 cards can capture taking little to no CPU, capture in RGB or YUY.

Capturing takes HD speed, not much else.

It's the compressing that takes CPU


DMA Mode 1 11.1 MB/s 40-pin
Multi-word DMA Mode 1 13.3 MB/s 40-pin
Multi-word DMA Mode 2 16.6 MB/s 40-pin
Ultra ATA Mode 2 33.3 MB/s 40-pin
Ultra ATA Mode 3 44.4 MB/s 80-pin
Ultra ATA Mode 4 66.6 MB/s 80-pin
Ultra ATA Mode 5 100 MB/s 80-pin

Those are burst maxium speed transfers.

[MrKGB]

FulciLives,
I have a friend with computer similar to yours and he captures at SVCD 480x480 without any problems. IMO any higher resolution for TV signal is an overkill.
I would suggest PicVideo MJPEG codec for compressing video.
It gives 6x compression at 19 quality setting and it is very fast.

[FulciLives]

Hello

Yeah I think I might just go ahead and get me a TV tuner capture card. If I find out the aforementioned P3 650Mhz computer I have is too slow I do have a faster computer I could use it on but I hate to tie up my main computer with video capture. I have a funny feeling I'll end up getting hooked and try to tape as much shit as possible hehehe.

And yes I am aware of the PicVideo MJPEG codec. I'm pretty sure I have that on my computer already from installing various software to do mostly VCD and DivX stuff. I know the P3 650Mhz computer would never be able to handle HuffyUV captures.

However, although I understand software mpeg2 encoders are SLOW I still thought that simple AVI TV tuner card type captures were rather CPU intensive. That's why I never tried it before. I figured the computer I was planning on using for the task would just be too slow to really capture anything over standard VCD resolution and these days I'd rather archive in either DivX or mpeg2 than VCD.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman