will an AIW work well with my set-up?

[tagy]

Hi, i am thinking of getting an ATI all-in-wonder card. I would like to be able to make VCDs from my VCR and DVD player.

Can someone tell me how does the quality compare to a normal ripped and encoded vcd ?

Also is the radeon better for capturing than the rage 128 ?

here is my set-up is this ok or is it too low a spec to capture vcd real-time with an AIW ?

PIII 450
128mb PC100


alot of questions i know but i cant seem to find this info in other posts.

thanks tom.

[doug1937@hotmail.com]

That's plenty for VCDs, and probably good enough for SVCDs, thought it might be pushing it. AIW is good; Radeon is newer than Rage, which is a plus. I have a Rage myself, and love it, but haven't used Radeon so I can't say much about that.

[ronbo613]

Hello-I have been fooling with my new AIW Raedon 7500. Since my system is 2X AGP and I have a firewire card, I did not go for the 8500DV. I also had concerns about the heat generated by the 8500DV. The 7500 captures very well, lots of flexibility, reasonably good quality. I think the PIII may not be enough for good MPEG2 capture. The card is new, I have not fully tested it out. The 64MB speed is a big improvement over my old AIW 128 16MB card. The Raedon is better than the Rage 128 for sure. Your system seems similar to mine, it should work about the same, you will need more RAM. For less than $200, the Raedon 7500 seems like a good upgrade.

[ggtronic]

depend on your quality expectation ?

people who like perfection usually capture in AVi format
then a capture device with mpeg encoding is useless !

the direct vcd capture of my AIW-radeon is a little worst
than Avi-to-mpeg encoding (but save lot'S of time#####)

that's why i use Svcd mpeg2 direct capture (99%compliant)
but , even with my 1.2Gig athlon , it took me a lot of "tunning"

the higher mpeg2 480+ encoded capture will possibly
cause you headake ! (p3,450 ! ) ,if you ever make it work,
you'l need complex system "tweeking" , perfect driver
instalation , perfect hardware configuration , and run the
application while everything else is SHUT_DOWN !

i also recomend WIN98se

[Tommy]

I don't think you have enough power in the box for the AIW.

[maxxnostra]

I am using AIW 128Pro PCI version with 16Mb SRAM (ATI Discontinued integrating Rage theather on PCI versions in 1999 and introduced AGP version later on which is a 5-10% faster for Video authoring), on Athlon 1600+ XP CPU (1.4Ghz)/MSI-K7266Pro2 Mainboard and SBLive 5.1 Sound card running on WinXP-Pro. I have no problems capturing in any format up to 640x480 without droped frames at all, but whenever I try higher like full D1 (broadcast) resolution 720x480 I'm getting killed with about 30% of droped frames. AVI Capture with native ATI driver however works without droping frames on this resolution (filesize is crazy), and DivX 4.12 with 1pass @2000kbps (not good filesize but almost half then native driver) is also without droped frames. However I want full DVD D1 resolution and I cant aford to get it out of my card. After days of reaserach on ATI Rage Theather Chipset I found out that even 640x480 is not native resolustion for this chipset, but 720x288 is. I am scaling this AVI Capture to 720x480 using LSX-MPEG suite and output is finally not so bad DVD movie.
OK my point is that for your needs which is VCD/SVCD you should be fine. It will take you a lot of experimenting with MPEG Settings (do not forget on MPEG-1 to set Motion Estimation Qality to 99% or 100% or you will get shitty VCD quality out of MMC).
My Recomendation: GET 40~80Gb HDD capture in AVI then Encode your MPEG file. TMPEG produces very nice and smooth VCD/SVCD output out of AVI files. Any realtime capture I have done with my AVI was not dood in MPEG Video quality. I've tried tons of setting and finaly decided that it is not worthed to save my time in authoring my VCD/DVDs by real-time capture versus the quality of capturing AVI and converting it to MPEG