System freeze/lockup during video capture

[PeterZ]

lusid: thanks a lot for the tip, you're right that prices have got that much down! Next time I'll do more research... anyway I wonder if at those prices the quality allows burning of video stuff...

Nelson: thanks for the response on MMC7.6 - unfortunately I can't run it, I tried a couple of times and it crashes on me as soon as it tries to start the TV app... I have an ATI Radeon VE graphics adapter, you'd think that it'd work Ok with the ATI TV Wonder VE, right? Wrong! Too bad coz' from your description it looks very promising... oh well.
Well, capturing at high qual. first and compressing in a second phase may well be what I'll have to do in the end, but I'll sure resist it as long as I hope to avoid it; haven't tried with PCI audio card yet, so there's still some hope...

Yeah, I'm also curious to see how they've implemented these DivX players: what bit rates are allowed, will it be possible to flash the unit when new DivX codec appear, what audio formats will be allowed (MP3? AC3? ...), etc... We shall see!

[PeterZ]

All,

just a brief update: you can read my latest attempts here:
http://www.vcdhelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=368970#368970

The reason I'm posting this is that I have FINALLY found a configuration which allows me to capture *hours* of DivX/MP3 without a single lockup. So anyone interested should click the link above.

The next thing I'm going to look for is a capture tool that not only allows the above, but also is "open to the outside world" in terms of being started, programmed/setup, and stopped. I'd like to be able to control these events from scripts (DOS/shell or Perl or ...), the said scripts I could run and program from e.g. an HTML page, i.e. from a Web browser...

Anyone cares to point
to such a capture tool? Again, it would also have to allow the selection of any video and audio codec for capturing, not just its own selection (e.g. PowerVCRII only allows MPEG capture...).

TIA,
PeterZ.