help a newbie

[Mr. Bean]

i own a cheap avermedia tv/fm 98 stereo tv card. using their provided software i can only capture as an uncompressed avi. so, when i tried this, the capture process stopped (crashed) at 3.99 GB. how am i supposed to capture things at high quality in win 98 for longer than 20 minutes? is there a program that will output a compressed format for me (so i don't have to capture it as an uncompressed avi first and then convert it?).

if it isn't too much trouble please email any advice/suggestions to: broliver76@hotmail.com

thank you,
oliver le

[Anatoly Neverov]

Try freeware SmartCap: http://nle.hardware.ru/hard&soft/smart/smartcap.exe , or shareware AVI_IO: http://www.nct.ch/multimedia/avi_io/avi_io_trial.zip.

The difference between them is that AVI-IO costs money, whereas SmartCap is free.

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Anatoly Neverov
Minsk, Belarus

[This_Idiot]

I haven't tried Smartcap, although I use AV_IO a lot. It will only use codecs that have been installed though, so you'll need to locate some that will do the job. There are a number of types of codec (eg MJPEG, MPEG, MPEG2 etc), and numerous actual codecs that will compress into one of these (or other) formats. You'll find that Windows installs some codecs by default, although none of them are particularly high quality.

[Dr Mordrid]

One of the most space-efficient codecs out there is PICVideo MJPeg. It's free, powerful and very fast even with a not-so-fast CPU. Download it here and then register it to get rid of the logo in its output;

http://www.jpg.com/mjpeg.htm

Combined with AVI_IO (which is WAY better than SmartCap BTW) this can provide serial captures of multiple 2 gig files up to the capacity of your drive. A neat bypass of the 2 gig file limit.

Once you move on to Win2K/NTFS PICVideo is also OpenDML compliant for those humongous captures possible with that setup.

Dr. Mordrid

[KRSESQ]

Doctor:

Quick question before I install Picvideo codec:

How well does it co-exist with the Matrox Mjpeg codec? Does Picvideo overwrite the Matrox flavor? If it does will it "break" Vid Tools?

Learning to look before I leap.

Kevin