Is my Celeron-433 good enough to capture?

[ZeroAquaduct]

I'm thinking of buying an ATI-TV Wonder for my Celeron-433 with 128 MB RAM and 28 G HD. Is my PC good enough for this card? I want to use it to convert VHS tapes to VCD.

[treborf]

My Celeron 466 (with 384 MB RAM) can handle MPEG 1 captures using my ATI All-In-Wonder 128 16 MB, so I imagine that your 433 can handle it. Beware, though: the quality of the real-time capturing is nowhere near as good as VHS, especially at VCD bit rates.

[videojack]

The capturing is not such a problem (i.e. when your harddisk can obtaine the capturespeed, should be a 7200rpm disk with DMA enabled) The problem is your conversion to VCD. The conversion demandes a lot from your memory, and 128Mb seems to be very low. And yes the qaulity of a VCD is a lot lower than VHS, you should use SVCD (but that would use 3-4 CD's to burn 1 movie).

[CubDukat]

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On 2001-08-17 01:15:15, hiroXP wrote:
I'm thinking of buying an ATI-TV Wonder for my Celeron-433 with 128 MB RAM and 28 G HD. Is my PC good enough for this card? I want to use it to convert VHS tapes to VCD.
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

I'm not sure if you would know this off-hand, but which type of Celeron do you have: the Slot-1 variant or the flat version? If you can, I'd recommend getting a Slot-1 Coppermine (PIII). For the capture, your chip has more than enough horsepower (I'm using the 600MHz version; it's a cut-down PIII Coppermine), but the lack of L2 cache is gonna slow down your encoding to VCD, and if you ever decide to try SVCD, it's going to get worse.

By all means, upgrade whatever you can. As far as memory goes, 256MB should be the sweet spot; apparently anything higher in Win98/ME is a waste because the performance doesn't get much better.

[CubDukat]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-08-17 08:15:05, CubDukat wrote:
<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-08-17 01:15:15, hiroXP wrote:
I'm thinking of buying an ATI-TV Wonder for my Celeron-433 with 128 MB RAM and 28 G HD. Is my PC good enough for this card? I want to use it to convert VHS tapes to VCD.
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

I'm not sure if you would know this off-hand, but which type of Celeron do you have: the Slot-1 variant or the flat version? If you can, I'd recommend getting a Slot-1 Coppermine (PIII). For the capture, your chip has more than enough horsepower (I'm using the 600MHz version; it's a cut-down PIII Coppermine), but the lack of L2 cache is gonna slow down your encoding to VCD, and if you ever decide to try SVCD, it's going to get worse. The 66MHz front-side bus speed slows down stuff in general, too.

(Actually, I should clarify that. You actually do have L2 cache; it's just half that of a PII or PIII)

By all means, upgrade whatever you can. As far as memory goes, 256MB should be the sweet spot; apparently anything higher in Win98/ME is a waste because the performance doesn't get much better.
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

[ZeroAquaduct]

Hmm... I guess I could get away without upgrading, but it'll be better if I do. RAM isn't expensive, so upgrading that will not be a problem. Upgrading my CPU might be a problem, since prices hasn't dropped yet.

I'll go buy this card and see if everything works. Thanks for the help!

BTW, if anyone else has more info, keep it coming!

[Beavis]

Get a WinTV GO instead of the ATI card.

[Beavis]

Get a WinTV GO instead of the ATI card. The software
and drivers are much much better.