Holy Video Capturing Laptop

[entwood]

This is just a post about something I wish existed. A laptop/notebook with two things.

1. Video Capture. (perhaps ATI AIW)
2. A DVD -+RW.

I call it a portable DVD production unit and I thought this was just a dream I had.

Now I see Toshiba (P25 - S607) has one of these laptops already. Has anyone tried these out yet or familiar with other laptops with video capture?

[unclebud]

If you have a DV cam with S-video or composite video/audio in you can get a Firewire cardbus PC card and capture to most notebooks on the market.

My setup is an $800 Compaq notebook and a Canon ZR camera. Works great.

[Capmaster]

If you have a DV cam with S-video or composite video/audio in you can get a Firewire cardbus PC card and capture to most notebooks on the market.

My setup is an $800 Compaq notebook and a Canon ZR camera. Works great.

I think he's looking to actually "capture" video. A firewire download from a camcorder is a file copy, not a capture.

I wonder if they do make an MPEG2 capture cardbus PC card.

I still use an external USB2 capture box from when I did video on a laptop. I use it on my desktop now.

That would work nicely, but it wouldn't be truly "internal" like I think you're looking for

[entwood]

I never though of external capture devices. But they're limited in features.

[richdvd]

Can't see how its possible to get GOOD captures on a laptop unless your upgrade to a higher RPM hard drive. 4200 RPM won't do a GOOD job, can you say dropped frames?

[BrainStorm69]

Can't see how its possible to get GOOD captures on a laptop unless your upgrade to a higher RPM hard drive. 4200 RPM won't do a GOOD job, can you say dropped frames?

Good point.

[ofbarea]

You can always use external firewire drives. Even though they will work, I would not recommend using USB2 external drives on a laptop because the CPU utilization is higher.

[jameshgross]

It is possible to get very good captures with a laptop.
I use a Dell Latitude C600 and Hauppauge WINTV PVR USB2.0 capture card.
Works very well.

[Capmaster]

Can't see how its possible to get GOOD captures on a laptop unless your upgrade to a higher RPM hard drive. 4200 RPM won't do a GOOD job, can you say dropped frames?

Not true at all. I used one for 2 years and it had a slow drive. I never had any dropped frames.

Consider this: the highest video capture rate for DVD is about 10Mbits/s. That's only 1.2 MBytes/s or so. Even the lamest, slowest IDE laptop hard disk made in the last 5 or 6 years is 66MBytes/s peak, with the sustained rate a tad slower than that. That's many times as fast as the minimum speed needed.

If you get dropped frames, it's not from a HD bottleneck

[HumanClone]

I use my fujitsu S7010 capture video using firewire port. It don't have dropped frames but the quality is bad, it always have small square of blur images. Can someone tell me how to solve it ?

[entwood]

Bad News
I dug up some reviews on cnet for TOSHIBA P25 - S607. (the video capturing laptop). Most reviews say its a great laptop, - video capture quality sucks. Srry if I got anybody's hopes up. User coments below.


Adam on 31-Jul-2003 07:30:10 PM
Pros: The screen is amazing... and the petium 4 with HT is super fast... The graphics are amazing and the sound is very good for a laptop.. Watching DVD's on it is amazing. Built in wireless is awesome
Cons: Well do not get this if you travel a lot. It is heavy 10 lbs and it wont fit in any laptop bag except the rolling clunker toshiba sells. The tv tuner is not grat and the out of box adapter is not cool at all.


greg on 23-Jul-2003 04:06:05 PM
Pros: great screen, powerful desktop replacement, windows media center.

Cons: tv tuner has only composite input making for very poor picture quality,

[upshot]

My Dell 9100 with a 7200 rpm drive does a great job caping via firewire. I've been considering an ATI AIW USB2 (with the cinema 200 chip) for analog caps. Granted it's a hog of a laptop (8 lbs.) but with the 128 ATI 9700, 7200rpm, 3.2 P4 and 1gb ram it's a 'mobile video workstation'

guess you can get one cheap nowadays...

[entwood]

ATI AIW USB2

what?

[upshot]

I guess i was mistaken.... it's the 'tv wonder' with the 'theater 200'