Navis Pro

[Jinxer007]

Hi All

Here's a E-mail that PentaMedia Sent me b4 I got a Navis Pro, Hope the info is useful:

The Navis Pro is Approaching the market in a different way than a DV Cards, This card Records from a PAL or NTSC format Via a S-Video or composite port for Video and an Analog Stereo Port for sound, the card then encodes this
Live feed into a Preset Mpeg format of your choice ( VCD, S-VCD, or Mpeg 1 /2 from 2 to 12 Mbps). With this Recorded file there are many options you then have.You can now play back all recorded files Via the S-Video / composite port output i.e. to a TV, VCR, or burn the S-VCD / VCD to a CD-R /DVD-R. If the files are recorded in Mpeg2 in either 4, 6 or 8 Mbps you can then manipulate them in DVD Junior the DVD Authoring Software supplied with the product.
Regards
David

There Web site is http://www.pentamedia.com

[JHebert]

Did they quote you a price for the Navis Pro? Can you buy it direct and ship to the USA?
I like that it also does MPEG playback through TV-out on the card. Another cool feature I saw was the ability to set the capture rate according to CD size. I sounds almost like a built-in bitrate calculator to figure out how to set up your capture settings to fit on a given size CD.
One more question - do you know if it can do transcoding of AVI files on your hard drive into MPEG or hardware re-encoding of existing MPEG files? Other low cost MPEG cards cannot and it would be a useful feature for converting existing files.

[Jinxer007]

Hi J Hebert
In the e-mail PentaMedia Sent me (sales@pentamediaeurope.co.uk)they said the cost of the card is £189(Pound)+ VAT (if baced in the uk)+ Shipping. I think you can buy the card from them Direct and they ship it to you. As for the AVI i could not see anything in there software to do this. but I will let you know if i do.
From
David

[Jinxer007]

I have found that i could play most Mpeg 1/2 VCD/ SVCD files back via the Navis Pro to the TV/VCR that where not recorded using the Navis Pro, but i could not get this to work with DivX Files.

[JHebert]

Thanks, that makes sense. Probably can only decode MPEG1/2 but not DivX or other codecs.