Tony,
You've gotten farther than I have. After having been happy enough with the MPG2 captures I never went back and tried VCD or SVCD. I mostly use this to watch TV shows at a later time, so I don't end up keeping the captures for very long. MPG2 files are still too big to keep forever (unless I do it for home movies that are less then 13 minutes apiece so they'll fit on CD and then I use the DVR), and I've never been happy with the quality of VCD or SVCD for archiving.
I use Win98SE, since I don't like what I've read about WinME, and the ATI W2K drivers are terrible for gaming. The latest display drivers from the web and the multimedia center from the CD have been working fine for me in 98. Almost no crashes when gaming (depends on the game) and rock solid stable for vid captures. I leave the machine on for weeks and it happily records my shows for me (80gig HDD).
I just wish it would record MPG2 captures that were good enough to keep. Their CBR doesn't look that great, and there's quite a bit of flickering, which I think is a Ligos problem with interlacing or DCT, not sure which. My Sigma DVR does great MPG2, IMHO, but it has no TV tuner or timed recordings. Sigh, if I only I could mix and match pieces and parts.
I can capture 640x480 on ATI's best quality MPG2 settings with no problem (<1% frames dropped). If I leave everything the same and bump it up to 704x480, I get massive frame loss, like a third of them. Same thing even if I try and bump other quality settings down while keeping that resolution, it doesn't like that res for some reason no matter what I do. Don't know what the problem is, it can't be my CPU as I have a PIII-800 and ATI claimed that you could do full size captures with a PIII-600. I wonder how they got that to work?
I wonder how the Matrox G450-TV with its software codec will fare in comparison to the AIW and its software codec? I wonder if they're both using Ligos underneath? I assume Doc and some others have received sample boards and probably know the answer, but then there's that pesky NDA that keeps them from telling ;-)
Mance
You've gotten farther than I have. After having been happy enough with the MPG2 captures I never went back and tried VCD or SVCD. I mostly use this to watch TV shows at a later time, so I don't end up keeping the captures for very long. MPG2 files are still too big to keep forever (unless I do it for home movies that are less then 13 minutes apiece so they'll fit on CD and then I use the DVR), and I've never been happy with the quality of VCD or SVCD for archiving.
I use Win98SE, since I don't like what I've read about WinME, and the ATI W2K drivers are terrible for gaming. The latest display drivers from the web and the multimedia center from the CD have been working fine for me in 98. Almost no crashes when gaming (depends on the game) and rock solid stable for vid captures. I leave the machine on for weeks and it happily records my shows for me (80gig HDD).
I just wish it would record MPG2 captures that were good enough to keep. Their CBR doesn't look that great, and there's quite a bit of flickering, which I think is a Ligos problem with interlacing or DCT, not sure which. My Sigma DVR does great MPG2, IMHO, but it has no TV tuner or timed recordings. Sigh, if I only I could mix and match pieces and parts.
I can capture 640x480 on ATI's best quality MPG2 settings with no problem (<1% frames dropped). If I leave everything the same and bump it up to 704x480, I get massive frame loss, like a third of them. Same thing even if I try and bump other quality settings down while keeping that resolution, it doesn't like that res for some reason no matter what I do. Don't know what the problem is, it can't be my CPU as I have a PIII-800 and ATI claimed that you could do full size captures with a PIII-600. I wonder how they got that to work?
I wonder how the Matrox G450-TV with its software codec will fare in comparison to the AIW and its software codec? I wonder if they're both using Ligos underneath? I assume Doc and some others have received sample boards and probably know the answer, but then there's that pesky NDA that keeps them from telling ;-)
Mance
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