Video capture on a notebook

[Indiana]

Originally posted by VJ
the laptop does have severe hardwarelimitations, such as hdd-speed, ..

Yes, but if the CPU is fast enough, the HD-speed is not so much of an issue anymore. Just use a codec like PICVideo MJPEG and you don'T need that fast of a HD. With a P4@2GHz you can do DivX on-the-fly with still acceptable quality and the requirements for the HD-speed have gone away.

[rodgreen]

Thanks guys.

The laptop is a P4@2GHZ, so I was hoping that the processor speed would overcome the "slow" HDD. The only thing is that you would not be capturing uncompressed video, so the edited quality wouldn't be as good.

Cheers.

[wkulecz]

Infinite processer speed cannot overcome a series of head seeks that cause the data thruput to drop below your streaming rate for longer than the buffered time -- ~3.6MB per second for DV.

Most modern notebooks can handle this if you keep the disk defragged.

--wally.

[Indiana]

Yeah, but the streaming rate when OTF compressing with DivX is between 1000-2000 KBit/s so this point is moot. Any HD can do this.

[rodgreen]

OK, so in summary:

The faster notebooks should handle compressed analogue video (eg. DivX or through a DV bridge) and DV without dropping too many frames.

But expecting it to capture full-screen from an analogue source (at say, 19MB/Sec) you would expect that the HDD couldn't keep up.

[rodgreen]

Originally posted by VJ
But I don't know if a PCI video card then becomes the primary video-card (as if I remember correctly, the Marvel needs to be the primary in order to capture video).
Jörg

I think you might be right Jörg - the laptop would want to run with it's own video driver as you can't plug the built-in LCD screen into the back of the PCI card!!!

Rod