software codecs

[inperson]

Im mostly a 3d animator and Im kind of a newbie to video so please forgive me.
Is it possible to use different software codecs. For example if i had a marvel g400 (which I will soon) I know I can use the morgan codec but what about like a mpeg2 codec. I dont really know if one exists, but some cards capture mpeg2 and it not hardware so... anyway I knnow it would probably use 100% of the cpu or something but is it possible in theory?

[Haig]

The apps that we provide with our cards (Avid Cinema and PC-VCR) will only capture in RGB Uncompressed or Mjpeg.

You can use any software codec you like but you will have to get a complete editing/capture package like Ulead MS Pro so that you can capture and edit with these software codecs.

If it's just for capture, then you can just download vidcap32.exe and use that for your software codec captures.

Haig

[This message has been edited by Haig (edited 27 October 1999).]

[fluggo99]

When you're editing, it's best to use a format like MJPEG because it stores the frames separately (which makes such files easy to edit) and it's quick. MPEG2 has better compression, but it compresses several frames together, meaning that decoding a single frame means decoding a whole bunch of frames together. It also uses a ton of CPU power.

What you'll probably want to do is capture and edit in MJPEG. You can leave it right there if you want or, if you want to send it to a friend via e-mail or CD-ROM or archive it for later, you can encode it to MPEG1 or MPEG2. MPEG1 has small frame sizes (only 352x240 max) but is best suited for web pages and CD-ROM's. MPEG2 is good for high quality compression. If you're just putting it back out to video, you'll want to leave it in MJPEG.

[This_Idiot]

Hi Inperson,

The most effective way of capturing via any of the Matrox vidcap boards is to use the native hardware MJPEG (unless you have an extremely fast and large raid array so that you can capture in pure RGB).

Once you have the video in-situ, you can convert/edit/create using MSP in any codec that you have available on your machine. The list of available codecs depends on what else you have installed on your PC. As well as codecs (such as morgan, paradigm) that you can deliberately install, you will find that installing other software also adds to the list of codecs that you can use. For instance, on my system at the moment I have the following codecs accessible from MSP :

Indeo versions 3.2, 4.3, 5.04
MS MPEG4 V1, V2, V3
Cinepak, Matrox MJPEG, Picvideo MJPEG
MS Video1, MS RLE.