suggestions before buying a pc

[fozynuts]

what can you suggest before i buy a pc? im going to buy a pc because i want to ripp vhs tapes to vcd or dvd.

[donpedro]

If you are willing to do some study or you have experience, I would recomend you to build PC by yourself. It will be much cheaper.

[Revilo]

I wouldn't necessarily say that building your own is cheaper. You can go get a PC from a local electronics store quite cheap nowdays, but the quality correlates to the price. The biggest advantage to building your own is spending your money where you want it. For video work, you will want a fast processor and a large amount of RAM, preferably DDR ram. Go for at least a 2.0 Ghz pentium 4 with 512 megs of DDR (thats at least, if you can afford more go for more). I usually use the 3/4 rule when I build my PC's. This means I build a computer to about 75% of the highest computers out. So if the highest processor out are 3.0 GHZ, then you would want to go for a 2.2 GHZ. This usually saves you a ton of money without sacrificing too much (in 6 months your 3.0 ghz would be outdated anyways). Fozynuts, hopefully after visiting this site, you realize that you also have quite a bit of learning to about video. You will need a capture card, of which I know nothing about, check to the left for info about those.

Back to the cost. You should be able to spend around $1,000 to $1,500 and build a very nice computer without junk in it. It will process video at a speed you will be happy with. If you go spend that same money in Best Buy or Circuit City, you will end up with something that you might think is as good, but it won't be. My brother recently bought a $400 PC that he thought was great. It was a pentium 4 1.8 GHZ (I think), but yet my 750mhz athlon ran better than his. Come to find out, he only had 96 megs of SDram and a crappy ass onboard video card.

Now, agreeing with Donpedro, if you build your own computer for $1,500 and then go try and price that at a store, it will be well over $2,000 with the same components in it, if you can even find it.

Revilo

[donpedro]

My first PC was from best buy. HP Pavilion. Problem that I ended up with was that it had only 2 slots for RAM and both were used, so memory upgrade mean waste of old RAM. Next catch up was that PC allowed only 256MB Max. Later on I wanted to add disk. Surprise !!! No space inside for that. And last one was that I wanted to add some card but my "3" PCI slots were full

I know ... it was crapy PC... but what did I know about it then. Who would thought that I will need all those new components... So think about future

[fozynuts]

hello everyone sorry for the late reply i just got a pc from my mom and this is what i got Dell Optiplex GX1 Desktop (450 MHz Intel Pentium III, 128 MB RAM, 8.4 GB Hard Drive), do you think this is ok for ripping, editing videos?

[Solarjetman]

hello everyone sorry for the late reply i just got a pc from my mom and this is what i got Dell Optiplex GX1 Desktop (450 MHz Intel Pentium III, 128 MB RAM, 8.4 GB Hard Drive), do you think this is ok for ripping, editing videos?

I seriously doubt you would be happy ripping to DVD on that machine. I have a 1.2GHz and it takes 10 hours to process a 22 minute video in DVD quality. That means you will be pushing 30 hours. Plus your hard drive is no where near large enough to hold DV video. That comes in at a cost of 12 MB/sec of video. Take into account windows and programs taking up space, you may just barely fit a half an hour of video on there. Definately not enough space.

As for VCD, you would capture at lower resolution, which means smaller file sizes, and shorter process time. You may be able to squeak by on that.


Edit:
I forgot to mention, my 350Mhz machine with the original All-in-wonder pro drops frames like soap in the shower . You would probably not be able to capture your own video unless you had a hardware encoder to compress it to mpeg first, or you captured at half size, then blew it up which would make it look bad.

[housepig]

if you really have to use that machine, I would highly suggest putting in as much RAM as the motherboard will take, and adding at least an 80Gb hard drive - 80Gb will give you about 3 hours of avi footage in the Huffyuv codec, and will leave you enough space to encode that footage to mpeg-2 (but just barely).

but a faster processor and more hard drive space would definitely make it easier on you....

[LanEvo7]

I wouldn't necessarily say that building your own is cheaper. You can go get a PC from a local electronics store quite cheap nowdays, but the quality correlates to the price.

I'm saying this in a polite way. This isn't true. There is not one major electronic store that sells a PC that is cheaper than you building it yourself. You would probably save $100-$300 building a PC that is similar to the one in the stores. The neighborhood corner PC stores offer better prices.