G200 purchase

[tybala]

Hi all,

I am buying a used G200TV today, and want to get some info on what to expect. I would like to use the card to capture home video off of Hi8, then convert it to SVCD. I was told that this card uses the same chip as the G400 for capture, and that a PII450 with 128MB RAM will suffice. Also, is $80.00 a fair price to pay for a card that old?

Thanks,
Ty

[Dr Mordrid]

It's price is in the right neighborhood. I'd put it at about $75-100 USD.

The Marvel G200 does indeed use the same MJPeg encoder as the Marvel G400. The Marvel G400 does, however, have one big ace in the hole: it has DualHead/DVDMax. The Marvel G200 does not.

DualHead/DVDMax is extremely useful as it allows you to play video clips of about any kind to the TV output. The Marvel G200 is pretty much limited to MJPeg, RGB (which requires a very powreful system to use) and DVD playback to the TV output.

As such I'd very much encourage you to get a Marvel G400 if you can find/afford one. DualHead/DVDMax really is that useful.

Either should work fine on your system for MJPeg functionality. If you later want to do HuffYUV (lossless) captures or other fancy stuff you'll need a bigger system. Don't let that worry you now though, you'll do fine with MJPeg for starters.

While you're at it look up the TMPGEnc MPEG encoder. It's free and works better than most commercial encoders.

http://www.jamsoft.com/tmpgenc/

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 29 January 2001).]