Capture cards using files for input?

[DJANDA]

Sorry if this is a daft question.

Can any capture cards be configured to get their data from a file rather than S-VIDEO?

Reason for asking is that I have a digital Camcorder and am concerned about loss of quality by feeding through S-Video.

Thanks.

DJ

[holistic]

Digital Camcorder !! lucky you.

Get a 'firewire card' if your camcorder supports it.

Miminal data loss.

[DJANDA]

I have a FireWire card. The question (which I should have been clearer about) relates to encoding to MPEG1/2 after I have transfered to disk.

In other words, I would like to use the encoding hardware of the cards, but get one to get the input from a file, rather than SVIDEO.

[holistic]

Ya lost me here ?!?!
If you have a DV camera and FIREWIRE card then that's it.
http://www.vcdhelp.com/capture.htm
Capture through the firewire card to the harddrive in DV format . ....... edit away
Then export to MPEG1/2 using anyone of many programs
http://www.vcdhelp.com/convert.htm

[Dman65]

I think DJANDA is wondering if any of the hardware based MPEG video cards can take the data from a file and run it through their hardware encoder and produce an MPEG file faster than what is typical of the software encoders.

[schlamassl]

Hi guys,

That is what I'm thinking about. I want to use an older PC as an DVD-Player and for caputering DV-streams. But it has only a AMD K6-2+ 500 Mhz CPU. Is that power enough to software-encode or do I have to use an additional encoding-card? Does anybody know of a combination of a (cheap) MPEG2-encoding-decoding card? As far as I know, most of the MPEg-cards coud only be used in one direction (endcoding or decoding, but not both)