Best way to capture with my Matrox Marvel G200

[sidneysides]

I have been captiring in WinXp using this card and MJPEG compression. My aim is to get the vids on to DVD ( i have been encoding the resulating MJPEG AVI with CCE to MPEG2). I've tried HuffYuv etc and my system can't cope with it (I have an Athlon 1200). I got dropped frames all over the place. Is MJPEG the best I could do?

Also, is it possible that TV broadcasts can swop the field order in the middle of programmes? When I watch my captured videos, the frames that are dropped nearly always seem to be at scene changes. Am I imagining it? I have captured with VirtualDub - this inserts dropped frames to jeep the audio and video in snch.

Ta

[jackhyde]

I use the MJPEG and set it to best quality, lowest compression, 704x480 @ 30 fps. I only have a Pentium II 400 but I get very few dropped frames with these settings. Be sure that your disk drives DMA is turned on. The Matrox software will test the speed of your drives and only allow settings that your system can handle. For example you wouldn't be able to select 704x480 @30 fps if your drives were not fast enough. I have never tried any of the other capture modes. I just assumed my system couldn't do it. Anyway I get very good quality and the size of the files are less than what DV files captured with 1394 firewire would be. If you have a much faster computer you may be able to use the other capture modes, but you mentioned that you were getting many dropped frames so something may not be up to speed. I noticed that I will get dropped frames if I touched the mouse during capture.
So you must make sure that your computer is not doing anything else while capturing. Also there is a little disktest program in the Matrox software that you can test your transfer speed of your drives. You want to use the fastest drive and it should be above 5 Mb/s. The faster the better. If this test shows your drives at less than 5Mb/s I would suspect that DMA is turned off on that drive.
I hope this helps. I think the G200 is a very capable capture card even though it is rather old now.