Windows XP or XP Pro?

[Graham Meredith]

I'm building a new video editing system based on the Gigabyte GA 8KNXP motherboard, and a P4 2.4G 800FSB chip. I'll be using a 40gb seagate Barracuda for the OS, and a Seagate 160gb SATA drive for capture. I may use my old Marvel G400 with software capture until I source out a suitable analog capture card, as I still need to do Hi-8 and VCR captures. The board has a built-in firewire card for digital capture.

Will XP pro have any extra features that XP lacks, that I may need? I want to use TMPGEnc for MPG 1 & 2 compression, Virtual dub etc, and probably VideoStudio 6 or 7 at this stage, MSPro later when the budget allows.

Also, suggestions for a new analog capture card in the bugdet price range (up to about $300US) ?

Cheers, Graham

[Adis]

- Use WinXP Pro

- Use Marvel XP Drivers from here

- You can capture directly into mpeg with UMSP 6/ 6.5/ 7

- For capture I recommend PC-VCR and AVI_IO

[Hulk]

I thought the primary advantages of XP Pro over Home were multiprocessing and enhanced networking features. Note that Home will work with hyperthreading.

- Mark

[wkulecz]

Personally, I'd stick with W2K. I'm not too happy with XP Home or Pro. XP Home won't do a domain login and has some annoying restrictions when trying to share only part of your hard drive on the network.

For me WPA is a showstopper for desktop systems -- I won't put up with it. For this reason I've not updated to VV4 and will not be buying Photoshop 8 either since Adobe has announced "activation" in future products.

--wally.

[Brian Ellis]

For analogue captures, I suggest a DV bridge, such as the Canopus ADVC-100. This has many advantages over a conventional card, as everything will be in DV format, whether from an analogue or a digitasl source. It is within your price range. I've been using one for about a year and find it as good as a Marvel for 99% of captures, if not better.

I agree with Wally re OSs. I use W2kSP2 (NOT SP3). Mark is right, too, unless you plan to move to dualie HTs or quaddies, then I see no advantage in XP Pro (and little in XP).

[Nowhere]

But isn't HT properly (effectively) used only in XP?

[Dr Mordrid]

Thats my understanding, but unless the software fully supports HT the benefit is nil to marginal as regards rendering times.

Dr. Mordrid

[Brian Ellis]

Quite frankly, this is a puzzle. Intel certainly say that XP is recommended, but this does not exclude other OSs. With my set-up, I certainly get a significant improvement in DV rendering times (MSP7) with HT on (over HT off), using W2k. OTOH, the difference in coding to MPEG-2 is small-to-negligible.

See Mark's tables at http://www.hyperactivemusic.com/mspro.htm for more details.

[wkulecz]

As I understand it W2K supports two processors unless you have W2K server.

But W2K sees HT as two processors and everything should be fine with a single HT CPU. However dual HT CPUs will not work right unless you have W2K server as it'll be regarded as 4 processors.

XP Home only supports a single CPU, but regards HT as only a single CPU.

XP Pro will work with dual HT CPUs.

Clear?

--wally.

[Dr Mordrid]

As anything Intel-$oft comes up with

Dr. Mordrid

[fberger]

XP Home, definetely.
I have been running a quad boot system (Athlon) with Win98SE, Win2k, XP Home and XP Pro for a while (MSDN). I don't see any advantage in WIN98SE, apart from running Matrox provided drivers for old Marvel cards. Even with such hardware, hacked drivers would work under w2k or XP. W2k is fine if you have it already, but if you are buying a new OS, why spend extra money to buy the old stuff? XP Pro is for users connected to a domain.
With Home you get all the advantages introduced with NT, W2k Pro and XP Pro without the "Pro" price tag. It's stable, kernel based, is supported by all recent hardware (your mobo's chipset supports SATA RAID0 only under XP).
Just make sure you list all the devices you plan on using, and if some are older, find out if they are supported by XP.

Fred

[wkulecz]

Why go where Billy G pushes you?

W2K has everything you need without what Billy G wants to cram down your thoat.

Legacy compatability is much better wtih W2k than any flavor of XP. Most things with NT drivers will work when installed with W2K's "Appcompat" utility. Parallel port operated scanners

XP home has serious issues if you only want to share certain folders on your hard drive with certain users.

The only place I'd ever suggest XP is on a notebook because WPA is not an issue when you can't change the hardware and XP fixed all the hibernation issues I've had with W2K (who need hibernate on a desktop?)

--wally.

[Graham Meredith]

Thanks to all for such a great wealth of information, this has really helped a lot. If XP home supports single CPU hyperthreading, I don't see the need for XP, as I won't be doing networking and admin stuff with it - it will be a dedicated video machine. I'll go for XP home, or even Win2k, seeing everyone seems to be still vouching for it.

I am still a bit confused as to some of the new hardware, though. Can anybody fill me in on things like the technical aspects of the new SATA drives? What are they, and how do they differ? I kind of get the impression that with the board I'm getting (Gigabyte GA-8KNXP) that the SATA drives can either be set up as IDE's or RAID. Am I correct?

As I will only be using one SATA drive, I take it that I need more than one drive to make a RAID array. Is this correct? If I did have more than one, however, what would be the difference of a RAID setup over a SATA IDE setup regarding data speed? Would a SATA IDE still capture DVD res uncompressed video OK? As I will want to have it in a removeable rack, if I have a RAID setup, am I going to have to set up the drives in the BIOS everytime I swap a rack with a different drive?

Brian:
Can you please elaborate on the "DV bridge" you mentioned? I'm quite interested, but have never heard of such a thing.


Cheers, Graham

[Nowhere]

there is no IDE's or RAID
By IDE most mean parraler ATA drives (older standard) and serial ATA is newer standard - they basically just mean in what way the drive is connected.
Raid is an array of drives (they should be identical) that allows for greater performance (by two disks acting as one, thus balancing load) or security (one drive mirrors the content of second one) or both. It has not much to do with type of connection (paraller ATA or serial).
Whether your system is RAID capable depends mostly on HDD controller.

[Brian Ellis]

The ADVC-100 is an external "black box" with analogue in/out and DV in/out with converters between them in both directions. See

http://www.canopus.com/US/products/advc-100/pt_advc-100.asp

Re OS, there is less risk of incompatibility with W2k than with XP and, as others have pointed out, there is no forced WPA gateism. Unless I absolutely have to, I've no intention of going XP, even though I have an HT processor.