Just starting out

[By_Tor2114]

Ok, it's pretty obvious that I'm new to this, so any help is greatly appreciated!

I will be making a PC in the new year and I want to be able to capture my videos on it in perfect quality. Now, I'm going to make this machine a hot rod, but I want to make sure I'll have enough of everything, so some required specs would be extremely helpful.

Thanks!

[KingJohn]

Motherboard, Intel D845HV
http://channel.intel.com/business/ibp/boards/d845hv_d845wn.htm

(You get to re-use your PC133 Ram)

Chip, Pentium 4, 1.6 ??

Hard drive
http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/prod/ds60gxpdata.htm

I just made one up this week, very very good !

Before I useto capture in mpeg or Divx, because of frame loss, but now I capture raw AVI at much larger size.

The new P4 was made for this work !!

[By_Tor2114]

Thanks for the info. What sort of card should I look at getting?

[KingJohn]

With a powerful PC, even the cheep capture cards work very well. I have a WinTV basic http://www.hauppauge.com/, and with the existing drivers it saves very good movies. With the German software installed I can capture direct to VCD.mpeg

There are more expensive cads that use hardware to capture mepeg files, but heck this machine does a great job.

I use to use a P3, 450 to convert the AVI's to VCD with TMPGEnc, each 200Mb use to take almost 1.5 hours, this will convert them in less than 30 minuets.

So spend your money on a good machine, the cheap capture cards all work well.

Some people buy good processors and terrible motherboards, that bottle neck everything, use your money on a good board and a good chip for top performance.

[onyx_z]

Just wanted to add my two cents here. If you are going to be using the machine for other things too, such as gaming, or watching DVDs or whatever, you might think about getting a good AGP graphics card with video in for capturing. I love my Asus V7700 DLX, which is a Nvidia GeForce 2 GTS. I'm making really great looking VCDs with it and VirtualDub and TMPGEnc. The NEW GeForce 3 cards are even better. I admit I haven't tried to make SVCDs or MPEG-2, but I have no reason to believe it wont do that just as well. Just be SURE to get GOOD FAST harddrives! if you want to stay ATA, be sure the motherboard supports ATA100, and be SURE to get at least 7200RPM ATA100 drives. You could also buy a motherboard with built in SCSI 160 onboard and buy FAST SCSI 160 drives, but that will kick your costs way up.
If I were going to build a NEW machine right now, I'd probably get an ASUS TUSL2 and a new Tulaine PIII 1.2 with an ASUS V8200 deluxe. Until they come out with DDR memory for the P 4, I'll avoid it. (should be soon) and I'm just not a fan of AMD, nothing against them, dont want to spark another religeous war here, it's just not for me.

[By_Tor2114]

Thanks for the info guys. Just as long as no quality is lost, I'm happy!

You've been a great help to me!