ATI TV Wonder VE

[easydvd]

I just bought this card for under $50. The price was the main thing that grabbed me obviously, since most of the other stuff I looked at was $150+. I completely understand that you get what you pay for and the reviews for this are somewhat mixed. At this point I plan on using it with Cyberlink Power VCR2. I also have the sourceforge drivers if that fails......


Does anyone have any suggestions for this piece of hardware that might save me some grief? I've looked through the guides and tutorials I could find at VCDHelp and am in the process of looking through all of the forum material as well. I was just hoping for any personal experiences that anyone might have to share. Any info that anyone has would be a help. I have ripped and encoded 100+ DVD's to VCD and SVCD so I have a fairly good grasp of what I'm doing as far as conversion goes, but I'm totally new to the video capture game. All I want is to archive Star Trek and some other sci-fi to VCD. I'm a little confused as to whether I should use the HUFFYUV lossless codec or if I should try to capture straight to MPEG1.

I know that with MPEG1 I can capture to HDD with a usage of something like 10MB a minute for video. What about HUFFYUV? I've read that it takes more CPU cycles as well as considerably more space, but that the final product is much higher quality and therefore more suited to conversion. I plan to use TMPGEnc for the VCD MPEG conversion. What kind of space in terms of MB per minute of video? What I have in mind is going to be like 44-45 minutes total after the commercials are edited out. How much disk usage for HUFFYUV is the question I guess.

My rig is running:

850mhz celeron
256MB RAM
WinXP Pro w/SP1
7200 RPM Maxtor HDD (15GB)
5400 RPM Western Digital HDD (30GB)

I plan on adding another 256MB of Ram in the next week or so. Will this be an improvement? I can always overclock a little too so I can pump my CPU up to about 1000mhz. Will the extra 150mhz be an improvement over the current 850mhz?


Maybe it's time to bug my wife into letting me spend the money for a Celeron 1.7 or 1.8..............

Thanks to everyone who helps in advance.

FREEWARE DVD rippack including SmartRipper,DVDx 1.6, VirtualDub and VCDEasy can be found at:

http://www.easydvdcopy.net

It's just the former proggies made into a one file installer, but I have had EXCELLENT results with the tools included.

[MOVIEGEEK]

My first capture card was the Wonder VE and it makes decent captures.
Stinky's regtool(free in Tools) makes a VCD compliant .mpg which looks good,but I would capture to YUY2 320x240(uses alot of space on HD) and convert to VCD with TMPGEnc(free in Tools).
The only piece of hardware I would recommend is a Pentium III(Coppermine),you can get a 1Ghz for $115 and it uses the same socket,Pentiums encode much faster than Celerons.

[Epi]

easydvd,

First thing you should do is to throw away those ATI Drivers and Software, use the SourceForge Drivers. Then make sure that you have DMA turned on all your hard drives. Then use VirtualDub to capture the video at 480 x 480 (even if it's just for vcd's I'll explain why later). Use the Huffy Codec and use YUV2 mode to capture. Once you have captured what you wanted run it through TMPGEnc to encode the avi file. The reason I tell you to capture at 480 x 480 is because if you capture at 352 x 240 the card will drop one field per frame and you will get jerky playback. When you capture at 480 x480 you capture both fields which leaves you open for IVTC if you want and you will get smoother video.

Hope This Helps,
Epi

[offline]

Pentium III(Coppermine),you can get a 1Ghz for $115 and it uses the same socket,Pentiums encode much faster than Celerons.

Yes but coppermine (P3) cores can be found in the new celeron's from
1000A to 1.8Ghz. Better off sticking with the celery and overclock
slightly to 133/133 (unless u have a decent fan then 138/138 will do
nicely)

[MOVIEGEEK]

Epi,
Thank you but I don't need help(maybe mental)I tried the sourceforge drivers and they caused my system to lockup.I currently use MMC 7.7
with my Radeon and I'm happy with the results.

[Epi]

MOVIEGEEK,

Sorry, I posted to the wrong person , I meant to address easydvd.

- Epi

[MOVIEGEEK]

Pentium III(Coppermine),you can get a 1Ghz for $115 and it uses the same socket,Pentiums encode much faster than Celerons.

Yes but coppermine (P3) cores can be found in the new celeron's from
1000A to 1.8Ghz. Better off sticking with the celery and overclock
slightly to 133/133 (unless u have a decent fan then 138/138 will do
nicely)

It depends how much you want to spend,you can get a 2.7GHZ P4 but it would not fit in a socket 370.My advice is from experience not theory,overclocking is too risky.Here's a good article Pentium III vs. Celeron:http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q3/000720/index.html

[easydvd]

ok. I have the sourceforge drivers installed, I didn't even put in the disk that came with my card. Everything seems to be working so far......

I have read the guides on capturing with HUFFYUV using VirtualDub and I also have WinDVR installed(tried PowerVCR but no crack.....ooops did I say that out loud) Anyone have an opinion about WinDVR? Say, compared to VirtualDub?

I'm a little confused though about using VirtualDub to frameserve. Can anyone tell me how to set it up with TMPGEnc as the encoder?

Can I capture at realtime with very little dropping with either of these? VirtualDub or WinDVR?
I can definetly live with like 1% or so dropped frames....that's like 10 in 1000 I think.

I've read that with HUFFYUV I can expect something like 4GB per 10 mins of video. I REALLY don't want to convert to NTFS to get around the 2-4GB limit. I suppose that leads back to the question about frameserving. Am I correct in assuming that it's a direct stream copy without ever REALLY converting to avi?

Thanks SO much for all of the quick replies!!!! I may even have this up and running quicker than I thought!!

[offline]

It depends how much you want to spend,you can get a 2.7GHZ P4 but it would not fit in a socket 370

true, but his celeron should do the task required with Mhz to spare.
Faster is better, for sure, but why spend $$ if you do not need to?

MOVIEGEEK: My advice is from experience not theory,overclocking is too risky.

Funny that, so was my advice. Because I respect your postings
I am not going say anything further except that could have be worded a little better in my opinion.