>are going to look at something like the snappy I would suggest that you go
>with a better video card like one of the ones from Matrox or ATI that have
>either a built in TV tuner (ATI) or the addon video capture card (Matrox).
>If you really want to go nuts get a full fledged capture card from
>Truevision or Pinnacle Systems (Miro) - at this point you will need either
>SCSI hard disks or one of those Ultra33 IDE drives and some serious
>processor also.
I use a Happauge WinTV card (cheap mono version), a P233 (64Mb RAM) which
work acceptibly for capturing video for personal use. The WinTV card (and
it's STB counterpart) are around $50 and occupy a PCI slot. It comes with
so-so software for editing and capture. I would recommend a newer solution
like the Matrox and daughter card but have no experience with them.
Disk space can be an issue. Capturing one minute of video at 640x480 res at
24k color-depth can approach 50Mb of space. If CPU peformance is lacking,
run the system as "light" as possible (i.e. no realtime video display
during capture, no compression) during a capture session and clean things
up later. My P233 had best results with this (no dropped frames) My dual
PPRO/RAID system could capture, compress and bake a cake simultaneously.
Compression works great for trimming captures down consdierably but I've
not done this for a while (last season).. If I remembered correctly, I
could get the files down to under 4Mb in size w/ 160x120 res., 8-bit audio
and 15fps using Intel's Indeo 4.3? Codec. I felt this was the best
compromise to quality/size.
At the time, I was thinking of putting runs on a website and played with
Codecs a bit to determine a) which was the most popular b) most efficient.
I think the 4.3 codec won but I can't remember.. :)
Anyway, hope this helped..
-Brian
'95 Miata R
-Brian
porterb@mediaone.net
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