ATI wins my battle for DVD capture

[keithm]

Will, the £33 vivo says it captures, same card but cheaper. worth trying and a decent gaming card if not

[Will Hay]

Thanks Brian.
Will check out the hardware you suggested.
If I could improve my current quality of capture I could live with £125.00
How does it work, am I right in thinking the IEEE (is this what you call a firewall?) is a PCI card and the DV bridge is an external device which:
I input my vhs or home movies into and then that is inputed into the IEEE card for saving to my hard drive?
You feel there would be no SB1024/Via problems as the DV bridge does all the work?
That would mean I could remove the RR-G yes?
Will Hay the actor (and astronomer?), yes - he's the guy I model my username on!
Although I'm only 31 and he died before I was born (or certainly before I knew who he was), I'm a big fan and have all his movies (they're available on dvd now, £7-ish although for free from me on vcd!)
Thanks Brian, much appreciated
Will 'Rob' Hay

[Will Hay]

Originally posted by Brian Ellis


I could return the compliment. There was a famous Scottish comedian called Will Hay, whom I remember seeing in the late 1930s....

You actually saw 'Will Hay'?
In person?
No way!!!!!!!!!!!
Where was it, or do you mean at the cinema?

[keithm]

Will, I hope you're not missing the point here. I am capturing on a Duron 1ghz (not an athlon) full screen DVD quality with a cheap Radeon card. No Raid, no ultra fast hard drives no dv bridge etc. The radeon has a chip (the rage theatre) to do the conversation so you don't need a monster PC to do the work. It might seem too cheap but if you can afford £33 try the radeon VIVO. Because the card captures to mpeg2 you don't need lots of disk space, I'm fairly sure it would also capture to SVCD size which would play in a DVD player (if you don't have a DVD writer).

I didn't believe such cheap option existed but I got radeon off ebay and it works great: even with a VIA chipset...

You really don't have to risk £125 to try the firewire root until you,ve tried a radeon....Honest

[Will Hay]

Thanks Keith.
I must admit I'm torn.
£150-ish for a dedicated device to do *exactly* what I need doesn't seem too bad, providing it does what I want with results far better than I'm experiencing (I appreciate there's no guarantee's Brian )
I suppose if I hadn't had the problems I experienced with the ATI A-I-W I borrowed then I suppose I'd give that a go and if worse came to worse could always sell it back on ebay.
Thanks,
Will

[Will Hay]

Originally posted by keithm
Will, the £33 vivo says it captures, same card but cheaper. worth trying and a decent gaming card if not

Having checked it out at the ATI site, and despite the seller saying 'he's 99% sure it does', the OEM version is an optional extra (?) and the retail version includes it (capture facility) as standard.
Will

[keithm]

I mailed this guy before: he says they are not true OEM cards but full cards sold to the oem market. As for an external device to do all the work, the Radeon is an Internal device to do the work! And nearly £100 cheaper. I swore I would never use an ATI but most reviewers say they have really got their act togeather in the last few years.

I don't know what format Brian's capture works in but if it's DV then you will start to have problems with the 2gb and 4gb windows limits-you won't have this problem if you capture to mpeg2 (2 gb is over an hour at very good quality, in DV it's 14 minutes-or maybe half that!)..

[keithm]

and: if the computer is tranfer the file over firewire the PC then has to to a file format (probably DV) you then have to convert is to another format to get a long running time, which takes time and processor power. If you want to capture old vhs (over 1 hour) you need a card that can capture to realtime Mpeg 2, you could even leave the adverts in and save time!

[Will Hay]

Thanks Keith, will consider and report back.
Thanks again,
Will

[keithm]

I've just looked at the analogue to DV convertor and it does just that, converts analogue to Digital Video. That's a whole new can of worms. You will need software to capture segmented video as you will hit the 2/4gb file limit. Worse still although the quality will be very good your PC probably hasn't got the horse power to play back DV from a timeline in an editor so you will have to covert the DV capture to Divx or Mpegs so you can play the whole capture... That's unless the product comes with some magic software that enables you to capture on the fly and be able to playback the DV from a slow PC. Brian: how does this box work? Do you have to edit the DV capture to make a longer video?

[keithm]

Hi will, so you took the plunge! I purchased one too for my other PC. I'm sure you won't be disappointed. If you haven't got a quick internet connection, if you want to put your email address in a private note to me I'll mail you a copy of the latest drivers (about 40 meg-took ages to download).

[Brian Ellis]

Will

If my memory serves me right, I saw your namesake as, I believe, Widow Twankey in Alladin at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, probably at Christmas 1938. As you're a fan of his, maybe you have details of when and where he played and confirm??? Exact details dim after 60-odd years

Keith:

You connect an analogue source into the black box and it comes out as a real time DV stream, which the IEEE-1394 card sees as if it came from a camera. Alternatively, you can send a DV stream to it from the computer and it comes out to play to a TV set and/or VHS recorder. It's as simple as that! The advantage is specially marked during capture, as the CPU has no work to do: the DV signal goes straight to the UDMA hard disk at the native DV bit rate, so it is virtually computer-independent for capture. I use MS Pro for the capture, configured to start and stop manually (I usually do a whole 1 hour VHS-C tape at a go to a single NTFS file) and then edit it. If using W98SE, then MSPro allows dropless sequential capture in 2 or 4 Gb slices. If you want to edit, you just bring down each file, in order, to the timeline and push them up against each other; playback is then seamless. At the end, you can play the timeline back to VHS tape or convert to MPEG (within filesize limitations). Note that a DVD in W98SE is limited to about 3.6 Gb as the image file must be < 4 Gb. This can all be done on a relatively low-powered computer as a DV stream is <4 Mb/s, compared with analogue streams which are usually much higher, even up to 30-odd Mb/s, depending on the codec used and the settings. The settings for DV are constant at 720x576 (480 in USA) pixels, 2.2.0 colour depth (2.1.1 in USA) 48 kHz sound sampling at 12 or 16 bits, stereo, no other settings possible.

The box comes with no software, magical or otherwise. It don't need nuffink. The only playback problem on a slow computer that I could foresee would be on a highly fragmented preview partition with many hefty transitions or filters. I believe playback of straight DV goes from the UDMA disk to the firewire, without CPU intervention. So the only prerequisite is to to have a good UDMA video disk(s).

[Will Hay]

Keith,
How does capturing the sound with these cards work?
Does the imput go directly to the sound card from the source, and the ATI software captures it as line in?
Will

[Will Hay]

Originally posted by Brian Ellis


If my memory serves me right, I saw your namesake as, I believe, Widow Twankey in Alladin at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, probably at Christmas 1938. As you're a fan of his, maybe you have details of when and where he played and confirm??? Exact details dim after 60-odd years

From the little I know of the original Will Hay, he made two of his finest and best remembered films in 1938 (Oh, Mr Porter) and 1940 (Ask A Policeman) so I'd be suprised (although not amazed) if he was doing pantomine in between
I could be wrong though, it has been known.
Is this the guy www.willhay.co.uk ?
Will

[Will Hay]

Originally posted by Brian Ellis

The box comes with no software, magical or otherwise. It don't need nuffink. The only playback problem on a slow computer that I could foresee would be on a highly fragmented preview partition with many hefty transitions or filters. I believe playback of straight DV goes from the UDMA disk to the firewire, without CPU intervention. So the only prerequisite is to to have a good UDMA video disk(s).

Only software needed then would be that to convert to mpeg?
I've been capturing to avi and converting to mpeg using TMPGEnc, only because my knowledge of software is nil.
I'm then using the TMPGEnc tools function to edit, merge etc.
I'd be insterested to learn of any more suitable software.
I have Ulead Movie Factory and WinOnCD5.0 so authoring (menu's, chapters, background images/music, correct term?) is no problem, it's the transfer to an acceptable format and then editing I'm a little niave on.
Thanks,
Will