How To Increase Capture Quality? Which OS? XP?

[John1112]

How to increase capture quality with video capture card or TV tuner card?
Change motherboard? which one good?
Change Processor? pentium or AMD?
Change 3D card? Via or ?
Change RAM?
Change hard disc?
Chnage OS? 98? ME? 2000? XP?
Any idea are welcome. Feel free to Post it. Thnaks.

[holistic]

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On 2001-11-26 19:03:31, John1112 wrote:
How to increase capture quality with video capture card or TV tuner card?
Change motherboard? which one good?
Change Processor? pentium or AMD?
Change 3D card? Via or ?
Change RAM?
Change hard disc?
Chnage OS? 98? ME? 2000? XP?
Any idea are welcome. Feel free to Post it. Thnaks.
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Well since you did'nt specify what you have ,I will tell you what i have.
AbitBE6r2 motherboard (BX chipset), Celeron 600 (overclocked to 901), 384Mb RAM, Maxtor ATA66 30Gb 7200 Drive, WinDOZE 98SE. The harddrive has been benchmarked at about 25Mb/sec sustained write (Very important for high res AVI)

Lots of good boards out there : Gigabyte, ASUS, Abit, just to name a few. Select yours depending on your needs.
http://www.tomshardware.com/
RAM will depend on the motherboard/chipset - DDR ram is best value for $$ right now
Harddisk is more a personal taste. Any name brand ATA100 should do the job. (i hear the IBM deskstar is having problems - do your research)

Capture with either - AVI_IO or Virtual Dub
Encode with TMPEGEnc

What is your source? If VHS then (for NTSC) 352*480 AVI captures will be no problem on any well built present day computer.

[homerpez]

JUST SPECULATING HERE:

I would go with as fast a processor as you can find (dual if you have $$$). Either Athlon or P4, as fast as you can muster.

Hard Disk? Same applies... at least an ATA-66 (UDMA? I forget the acronym), probably a 100 or SCSI would be even better... bigger, faster, better.

RAM? Man, do I ever wish this mattered. I have 512MB in my machine, only to discover that precious few programs actually USE RAM AT ALL. I wish at least one capture prog would use RAM as a buffer, to reduce or eliminate dropped frames, but as far as I know, none do.

OS? Personally, I would go for 2000 or XP, for the NTFS factor (your captures can be as big as you need, no file size limit). 2000 is obviously faster, as it has a smaller "footprint" in resources (look under Task Manager - Performance to see it tick)... XP is probably also fine if your machine is a bit faster than the norm (I'm able to use V-Dub with it no problem)...

I think the #1 issue with capture is your hardware first, CPU speed second, hard drive quality 3rd, OS 4th. Just my opinion.

[John1112]

sorry, forgot to state my PC info,

Pentium 3, 866Mhz
128 RAM
Windows XP
ASUS Motherboard
VIA chipset
Built-in Trident Video Accelerator Blade 3D/ProMedia
Fujitsu hard disc
Kworld TV Tuner card

My TV tuner card is OK, quite good when viewing, but when recording, the graphic is vibrating. But I think the TV tuner card is OK, thinking to incease the PC performance.

The CPU usage is 26% when recording, not fully utilised 100%, so i think increase speed maybe will not solve the problem since still have 74% for it.

Checked the System Monitoring Info, the RAM seem not the cause. Not much ram used for capture and recording.

The ASUS motherboard, I think it is OK

I went to VIA chipset website, Found a latest 4 in 1 service pack driver for XP, but it said "if your PC no problem, don't upgarde the new deiver". So, still worry install or not install? please give some opinion.

Windows XP, inside device manager, it only shown "use DMA IF AVAILABLE", so thinking izit using DMA? or not? How to test it? I cheched under the BIOS, got some settings about DMA, but don't know how to do?
Another thing is, should i change the CPU from normal to High priority under TaskManager, Windows XP?
Asked many support, but they only said "better don't adjust it".. ?

Fujitsu hard disc 5400RPM, but it said maximum transfer rate is 100MB/s with Ultra DMA. what the different? RPM(hardware) or DMA(setting) play the main part?
I'm thinking to change to 7200RPM hard disc, but how about SCSI hard disc? worth for it? seem quite expensive.

My self opinion, thinking to change to hard disc 7200RPM, any suggestion? Why my friend always asked me to change motherboard and CPU? He quite expert, but i still not agree, I think is hard disc. So, please give some opinion, motherboard & CPU really mattered?

The branded 3D card really increase the recording quality?
My friend always asked me to change motherboard because mine one is built-in 3D. Please give some opinion

My opinion....hardware which increase the quality, #1 is SCSI hard disc, #2 is Motherboard, #3 is CPU, #4 is 3D card. Thanks for "Holistic" & "Homerpez". Hope can make some contact with u.

Thanks.

[BillTheKatt]

If you're capturing raw data then hard drive speed would probably matter the most. If you're compressing/encoding as you capture processor speed is going to be very important.
Despite what many people think ATA-100 has nothing to do with hard drive performance. ATA-100 (IDE) transfers information from your harddrive to your system at 100 MBytes/sec. But the fastest hard drive out today, including SCSI models can't really read/write data faster than 25 MBytes/sec from the disk platters. So using ATA-33, 66, or 100 doesn't make a difference for long writes. If you are reading or writing a small piece of information it can make a difference, since the disk has cache on it, but for long video streams it doesn't matter.
Hard drive read/write speed *is* related to how fast the disk spins. 7200 RPM drives will r/w faster than 5400 RPM ones. SCSI won't really make a difference, it will lower your CPU usage while writing, but not enough to matter IMHO and SCSI costs $$$.
I recommend for disk you buy an IDE RAID card. They're pretty cheap, and some new motherboards come with them onboard. If you use RAID-0 (Striping) you can double the amount of data you write to the disks. It uses 2 (or more) drives and writes to both at the same time. So you can tranfer 50 MB/sec if you have two 25 MB/sec IDE drives. I use IDE RAID and let me tell you it flies.
I can capture MPEG2 at 640x480x30fps at 4000 bit rate no problems, but it maxes out my AMD Duron 900 MHz CPU at 100%. If you're buying a new processor I'd get an AMD Duron 1.2 Ghz minimum, better an Athlon XP 1.4 or 1.6 Ghz.
You're video card should have nothing to do with capture or encode performance unless the video capture is on the card.

[AndrewDV]

Hi,

Getting a dedicated RAID0 setup with 7200 RPM drives definitely helps with capturing. With drive prices as low as they are, it is a relatively inexpensive upgrade. In general, that type of setup allowed me to capture PIC MJPEG AVIs at highest quality with no drops.

After some tinkering, the Promise FastTrack ATA100 card does the job really well (SMART needs to be turned off). This card can handle up to 4 drives, but performance tends to peak out with 3 drives.

[JHebert]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-11-27 02:51:07, John1112 wrote:

My TV tuner card is OK, quite good when viewing, but when recording, the graphic is vibrating. But I think the TV tuner card is OK, thinking to incease the PC performance.

The CPU usage is 26% when recording, not fully utilised 100%, so i think increase speed maybe will not solve the problem since still have 74% for it.

Checked the System Monitoring Info, the RAM seem not the cause. Not much ram used for capture and recording.

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I'm not sure what you mean by "vibrating" when recording, but its possible that your field order capture settings are reversed. Try switching the field order and see if it helps.
You might also be seeing interlacing artifacts if you are capturing both fields such as at 640x480. This is because of how progressive PC monitor displays interlaced video. When you encode to MPEG you can deinterlace if this is the problem.
Otherwise try to be more clear about what "quality" problem you are having. Are you experiencing dropped frames? Are you unable to capture at a desired resolution and framerate? Give us more info about your goals before trying to solve the problem with hardware.

[holistic]

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On 2001-11-27 03:32:42, BillTheKatt wrote:
Hard drive read/write speed *is* related to how fast the disk spins. 7200 RPM drives will r/w faster than 5400 RPM ones.
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********************* INCORRECT ***********************

The aureal density is what decides read/write speeds more the rpm (although all things being equal it is the deciding factor)


Read This -http://www.storagereview.com/welcome.pl/articles/200102/20010226WD600AB_1.html

[John1112]

the picture "vibrating" means many white/blank vertical lines occured when recording (viewing without record is fine) every 2 to 4 seconds. Went to the website, they said enable DMA, install latest VIA driver but all i had done it, still the same.
Your recorded movie with TV tuner card have any funny vertical lines at the picture every 2 to 4 seconds?

Thanks.