About MPEG cards?

[lnetzel]

I have all the Twin Peaks episodes om PAL VHS from Swedish Television without comercial breaks and since it's not realeased on DVD and are no plans on it from what I know I fungured I could turn this into a digital format instead. I have a Normal Graphic card with 32 Mb RAM with Video In and Out.. but I have capturing into AVI and then Encode with TMPG enc cause it takes forever and I don't have the HD space for it (Pentium III 600mzh. 10 Gb (full) and 256 Mb RAM). I have read I could capture into MPEG-1 or maybe MPEG-2 directly. What do I need for this, a MPEG capture card.. but here's my questions:

1. Do I REPLACE my Graphic card with this MPEG card or do I run them at the same time?

2. If I need to REPLACE, how do I know games like Quake 3 Arena will work and look good?

3. If I can have both cards installed at the same time, do I need a speial motherboard to handle that, my AGP slot is already taken I guess?

4. What would be the best card for me to buy to encode all these episodes into a NICE quality VCD or SVCD?

please help,

[Rufus]

hi,
if i remember correctly, mpeg cards are pci only (very old ones are isa-slot). you dont need a special mainboard.
only a free pci-slot and a free irq.
the best cards for that??
i think cards from FAST are the best for that.
but wait for responses from the other members.
cya,
rufus

1. Do I REPLACE my Graphic card with this MPEG card or do I run them at the same time?

2. If I need to REPLACE, how do I know games like Quake 3 Arena will work and look good?

3. If I can have both cards installed at the same time, do I need a speial motherboard to handle that, my AGP slot is already taken I guess?

4. What would be the best card for me to buy to encode all these episodes into a NICE quality VCD or SVCD?

please help,


[/quote]

[Iview]

I guess if you don't want to do the software offline encoding, and want to keep your game orientated video card in, there seems to be no choice but go for a PCI based realtime hardware encode capture card. They are not cheap, the more affordable one at consumer level is the Dazzle Digital Video Creator II (I think it is named something else in Europe) . If you are mostly capturing movies, VHS or TV, it will probably work for you, because your editing mostly involve only in cutting and splicing, no problem there. You see, the editing program that comes with DVC II is a little buggy for heavy editing. The resulting capture looks quite good in MPEG2 for SVCD, you can start cutting the disc as soon as you are done capturing, no need to transcoding. VCD look crappy, because the VCD template is locked, and cannot be fine tuned.
Min. requirements : 400Mhz, PII, Celeron, AMD K6-2 (note: some AMD/VIA owner have difficulty with the card). 64MB of RAM. Because it has a C CUBE encoder chip for encoding, it will take the load off the CPU. No frame drop in capturing. It will take 1 PCI slot with delegated IRQ (no sharing). No special motherboard needed, you can have both the AGP video card and the PCI capture card on the same motherboard.
for more info:
look under OTHER > Capture Card to your left on this forum for user comments.
go to Dazzle > http://www.dazzle.com
DVC II user group > http://stop.at/dazzle2 (they probably can tell you the name of the European version)

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Iview on 2001-07-08 16:26:26 ]</font>