Guys any opinions on how I can achieve the best captures with my setup?

[pr-guy]

Celeron II 566 @ 952mhz
192 megs PC133
Abit BE6 rev 1.01 latest bios
Western Digital 20 gig UDMA-66 5400rpm
IBM Deskstar 45 gig 75GXP 7200rpm UDMA-100 (running at 66)
WinTV Theater pci
SBlive Value
6x Toshiba DVD-rom
Philips CD-RW 8x/4x/32x

All running on Win2k with SP2


Also question. I know capturing via the coaxial cable tv feed is very bad quality. so how do I capturing cable TV in best possible quality with my setup. Thx

[AndrewDV]

Hi,

Capturing cable TV is pretty straightforward. There are some attenuators and boosters out there. IMHO, they are just a waste of money. Those devices tend to make any noise worse. The important items with coax quality are:

-Incoming signal: If the line into the house is bad, the rest is worse.

-Use quality cabling: RG6U

-Use quality connectors: Experiment with this one because it is very important. Black box used to sell great connectors.

-Short and direct runs: Avoid spliters and long distances when possible.

I'm not sure if it is available in your area, but there are digital cable options. There is a set-top box that gets installed. On that box, there is typically more than just coax. You can use the svideo or composite connectors from there to get a better signal. Keep in mind, digital cable is not an inexpensive option.

As far as doing some software filtering after/during capturing, VirtualDub has plug-ins that can help a little. In general, it is another set of experimentation resulting in lost sleep .

Looking at your system, consider capturing using PIC MJPEG. That codec can get high-res captures on basic machines. It also has excellent playback abilities. For kickers, it even makes outstanding files that can be converted into VCDs and SVCDs (Quality set to at least 18 for this one).

Also, this has become a mantra for some, but hold the SBLive in suspect when there are frame drops when capturing audio and video. If this becomes an issue, get yourself a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz.

Finally, the IBM hard drive you have is great. You can probably capture 352x240 and 352x480 aok using it. If you can, consider buying an identical 2nd drive and a Promise FastTrack100. CPU speed only made a slight difference in capturing for me, but adding a RAID0 setup opened the playing field completely!

[mikiem]

Adding to Andrew's post, one of the things I've seen, is using old analog splitters and such with digital cable before the box where it matters.