ATI AIW 128 Video capture cards

[Bstansbury]

Would anyone offer a suggestion as to which card would have better performance in Video capture,.. the PCI bus or the AGP video buss.

My assumption is that since the goal is to get video in and out of the card and stored into the hard disk,.. that the PCI buss would be faster. However, the AGP buss has higher bandwidth. The other point is that no mater what the AGP BW is, the Video card still has to move the data through the AGP buss, through chips on the motherboard, and finally out the IDE buss to hard disk. The IDE can burst at 66MBS and the PCI is limited to 33MBS. It sounds as if it would be a simple answer and the AGP should win,...

Hope someone out there knows the answer. I have a PCI card and I may have to take it back and exchange it. This could have a large effect on "Dropped Frames" and CPU load.

[fryerman]

I have used two video capture cards. My first one was a Happage winTV PCI(Inexpensive). It had a tuner on it too. That was cool. It captured great in Full frame,no compression. I wanted to capture directly to divX. On my 450 K6III, it would drop frames bad. Then I got the Rage Fury Pro AGP. Capture and TV out. Same thing, no better. I just built a new puter. 1 Gig T-bird,512 meg of sdram. A cheap ECS Mainboard. No more dropped frames.

You never said what your system was,or what kind of card it is.

I think the dropped frames had more to do with the cpu being able to keep up to real time, than which bus was being used. If you are talking about a PCI card with hardware compression(expensive), you will see an improvement. But if you got one using software commpression like the one you have now, I don't think it would be any better.

[Bstansbury]

Thanks for your reply. I tested my system last night and found that if I capture at any mpeg format, my system hits the max usabe (100%) immediately. If I use AVI capture then it only runs at about 45%.

My system is a Duron @ 700 MHz, 256 MB, ATI AIW 128 (32), 80 GB ATA 66MBs hard disk. I can overclock the CPU much higher but I'm not sure that will make much difference.

The ATI card specs indicate they use "Hardware assisted software MPEG compression. Doing this in real time in any CPU really takes some punch. If I push my system up to 1.0 GHZ, Istill don't believe that it will capture without dropping a lot of frames. I think that the MMC TV capture indicated that I was only get 25+-% of the frames.

In reading many of the comments on this forum about capture, is seems that the best thing to do is forget about real time capture of MPEG and just do lossless AVI capture and use TMPEGen. to create compliant VCD's. I need to Edit all my 8mm data anyway, because there is all kinds of bad scenes that need to come out.

I believe I'm going to take this card back. It has so much function that I don't think I will be using, such as the real time(attempt)at MPEG capture, 3D high res. graphics for games, etc. If I thought that exchanging my PCI card for the AGP card with 4x bandwidth would help my capture, that would be a totally differnet story.

If any one else would like to comment on these issues I would really appreciate some more insite. Thanks

[patrickm]

with a the rage fury pro, duron 700, ata66 or better hdd, and 256Mb ram, you should be able to capture 480x480 MPEG-2 SVCD bitrate (~2300kbps) with virtually no frame drops. i have an athlon 900 w/256, and the AIW 128 Pro (same capture setup as rage fury pro vivo) and i can go 640x480 MPEG-2 14Mbit with either 0 or that lame <1% (where it drops the first one but the counter stays on)

what OS and what drivers/software are you using?

win2k:
DirectX 8
Directx 8 DV/video cap update
ATI drivers 5.13.1.192
ATI MMC 7.1
ATI DVD 4.1

win9x:
DirectX 8
Directx 8 DV/video cap update
ATI drivers 4.12.6292
ATI MMC 6.3 (into default directory)
ATI MMC 7.1 (into any other directory than 6.3 is in)
ATI DVD 4.1 (even if you don't use dvd, it's a bug fix, into the 7.1 dir)

turn off all power saving features, screen savers, virus crap, office findfast, etc
don't capture to your system drive

[next]

patrickm - as far as that lame first frame drop I agree. To avoid it wait about 30 seconds or so before you begin your capture. I noticed when I had system monitor open it took about that long for the system resources to settle down after starting the TV app. It will hum along for a bit at like 60% right after you open the TV app and then drop to like 16% and idle there. If you begin your capture before it settles down you'll see the >1% drop.

Open system monitor and watch what happens when you start the TV app.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: next on 2002-01-12 21:45:13 ]</font>

[Cdub||]

BACK to original Question YES use AGP becasue nothing else on the system is using the agp bus except for your graphics card where as other things will be sharing the pci bus


PCI bus is not only things plugged into pci slots its onboard devices as well