ATI Radeon AIW VS Marvel G400

[ODiN]

Any of you guys have experience with both of these cards? I'm thinking of scrapping this Marvel G400 for a ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder, but not sure how the drivers for Win2k compare. I know ATI has been dogged for their crappy drivers, but hey, it could be different now...

[Triactor]

My only concern with the AIW Radeon would be the lack of on-board hardware compression....

Would or should this be an issue with cpu's over 500Mhz?

[AVminor]

In spite of claims that the MJPEG vs. MPEG II video capture has been discussed many times, this topic really needs to be openned again in light of recent announcements from both ATI and Matrox. Of course, the All-in-Wonder Radeon will ship later this month and the Matrox G450-eTV later this year. Matrox has crossed into the ATI camp with this product and is shunning MJPEG in favor of MPEG II. The claim is that with machines at 500mhz and higher in the marketplace, that the Zoran chip no longer makes sense. But I do have to wonder about image quality and all of the issues such as input/output from VHS tapes. On the other hand, maybe they are just throwing in the towel altogether, figuring DV is going to beat out everything. This should be an interesting year. And I call upon all of the seasoned veterans in this forum to comment on this very timely topic. Is the world about to change?

[ODiN]

Well, considering that MJPEG still plays choppy at times due to crappy Win2k drivers I don't see how the onboard hardware compression is even an issue...

[Dr Mordrid]

Yes, the world is a changin'. MPEG-2 will, IMHO, take over much of the analog editing world.

Note that much of the software that supports MPEG-2 also supports I-Frame capture and editing (RT-2000, DVD1000, MSPro6). This is very important for maintaining quality when editing.

I-Frame MPEG-2 is just as edit-able as MJPeg and can deliver excellent quality for SVCD and DVD, two of the up-and-coming home technologies. Once edited MPEG-2 I-Frame can then be compressed into VBR (variable bitrate) or CBR (constant bitrate) temporally compressed MPEG-2 with little loss of quality.

This is especially important since some of the very-new DVD players not only support VCD, XVCD and SuperVCD on CD-R but DVD-RAM disks with DVD content. Hmmmmm....

Dr. Mordrid

[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 09 October 2000).]

[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 09 October 2000).]

[Hulk]

Interesting discussion.

I don’t think hardware assisted capture will be necessary on pro-sumer based video capture cards. Especially the multifunction video cards. Here’s why:

Only recently has it been possible to capture video without additional hardware. The Marvel solution was a good one when a PII 300 was a prohibitively expensive processor. In addition, hard drives fast enough to provide the bandwidth required by were also very expensive.

Processors have advanced at a rate almost no one would have predicted a few years ago. 600Mhz is considered a relatively low end machine. 800-900Mhz middle ground and 1Ghz and beyond high end. Huge fast and cheap hard drives have accompanied these new processors into the marketplace as well.

As processing speeds and hard drive speeds have increased our video choices have also increased. Video capture can be accomplished in a variety of low cost methods:

Lossless capture – My processor a PIII 550 and I can capture using the huffyuv codec.

MJPEG – Again, I have no problem capturing using my ATI AIW using the PICVideo codec for MJPEG capture. I think the quality is actually better than with my Marvel G400TV.

MPEG I/II – I can capture full D1 with my AIW. Granted, I cannot push the motion compensation slider past about 8 (out of 20) before my system becomes unstable while capturing. The motion compensation slider in the ATI multimedia center is a measure of the “aggressiveness” of the vector prediction. I wonder if a PIII 750 or 800 could capture with this slider pegged at 20. My captures are very good at 8 and I only assume they would be better at 20. The quality of real-time MPEG II captures via AIW are not nearly as good quality as with huffyuv or MJPEG and then TMPEnc encoding. But then again TMPEnc only does about 3 frames per second on my system. Unless the code was re-written more efficiently I would need about a PIII 5500 for real-time capture at this quality level!

DivX – I can capture at 352 x 240 using this codec. I can only wonder what processor it would take to do full D1 capture with this codec.


As processors become faster MPEG II and DivX captures will only become better and better. Maybe Matrox and ATI are jumping the gun a bit but I believe they know where the market is going.


The real issue for me is what video card has the best capture quality using a high bandwidth, less compressed format. Like huffyuv or low compression rate MJPEG. I like to capture and edit using one of those formats. That way I can re-compress using a high quality codec to a variety of formats.

Although some people in this forum tend to look down on the ATI products I believe that my AIW captures are clearer and have more vibrant colors than my Marvel captures. I have both cards and have done many tests and always come up with that same conclusion. The colors of the Marvel are somewhat less intense (even after adjusting) and it appears that the anti-alias routine is working overtime. High contrast edges captured on the Marvel are always a little soft compared to the ATI card.

Just my $0.02

Mark


[This message has been edited by Hulk (edited 10 October 2000).]

[Dr Mordrid]

It's easy to make a card that can encode YCrCb (YUV, YUY2) from analog video. Once you have that stream you can encode to anything you want with a good codec. It's also cheaper and Win2K proof if the codec is written properly.

I say Win2K proof because the Zoran chipset only comes with a VfW SDK, no WDM SDK.

Notgood for Win2000 users, especially given that its VfW-to-WDM translation layer is basically screwed. This is why it's so hard to write hardware MJPeg analog capture proggies for it.

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 10 October 2000).]

[Alexei]

Doc and others,
Any examples of good and _affordable_ cards for YUV and YUV2 input (for further software compression)?
I am planning a new system based on Duron 750, and I think I will leave my RR-S/Mystique combo in the old PC. I plan to switch to DV, but I still want analog captures capability. I am not considering any integrated solutions like Marvel or AIW - just a GeForce board for the main graphics card. So, I would probably need a separate analog capture card.
Please, any suggestions?

[This message has been edited by Alexei (edited 10 October 2000).]

[Dr Mordrid]

The Hauppage PCI cards work well enough, and some even have TV tuners;

http://www.hauppage.com/html/wc_data.htm

Dr. Mordrid