AVI or MPEG?

[Jetboy55]

I seem to remember having pretty good luck with visual quality when I had a AIW 128, but got lots of dropped frames with my AMD k6-2 475mhz capturing to mpg. That was a while ago. Now I have my C core Athlon at 1.2ghz so am ready to try again. I tried a Dazzle DVC USB and couldnt get any decent quality. At high bit rates it seemed ok like vhs, but when at vcd quality it was horrible with macroblocks all over. Im trying to figure out if my problems are mpg coding problems or hardware problems. So I was wondering about trying avi capture instead of mpg capture....
I have 80gb raid array, so storage should be ok. If I capture to avi first, edit, then use tmpgenc to encode to vcd or svcd compliant mpg, would that help me to have better quality? If good quality is achievable this way, do the 50$ avi capture cards work well, or do I still need to spend 100's of dollars on a avi capture solution?
If I stick with mpg, I was thinking of ATI AIW Radeon 8500. What do you think?
Thanks alot everyone.

[Jetboy55]

Please help anyone. Thanks.

[mpack]

Frankly, with the Dazzle USB I think you're caught between a rock and a hard place...

For MPEG captures: like most "live" MPEG captures the picture quality is poor. To get optimum quality for a selected bit rate you really do need to compress offline.

However, you can't capture high quality uncompressed .AVIs either with the Dazzle because USB just doesn't have the bandwidth. At best the spec for USB gives you 10mbit/s, while in practice the Dazzle seems to have a limit of about 4mbit/s. To capture uncompressed 352x288x25fps YUY2 (eg. for a PAL VCD) would need a bit more than 40 mbit/s.

So, my recommmendation, unfortunately, is that you consider junking the Dazzle and get yourself either an internal or firewire capture card instead.

[Jetboy55]

I had just borrowed the Dazzle USB from a friend at work so I havent wasted any money. Seems I read the AIW Radeon 8500 has two built in firewire ports for a future upgrade to digital cameral. Too bad they dont make a digital camera that can take an analog input and record it DV, then my upgrade to DV would solve my problems. But I still wouldnt be able to put DV on a cd and play on DVD player, right?
PCI bus has 132MB/sec throughput right? If so, a add in pci tuner/capture card should have enough bandwidth to capture good AVI right? Thanks for the help?.

[mpack]

The PCI bus has plenty of bandwidth, provided you don't try to do too much with it at once. That is one reason why it helps to get an AGP graphics/capture card, since that way the data (aud and vid) streaming *in* from the card isn't also having to share the PCI bus with data streaming *out* to the hard disk drive. It also helps to have UDMA support (enabled) on your hard disk.