Rainbow Runner Studio for VCD authoring?

[logic7]

I have a Mystique220 and Rainbow Runner Studio collecting dust. The thought occured to me that I might be able to use the RR to record some of my old VHS movies and burn them as VCD's.

Why VCD? I just picked up a laptop fairly cheap (K62-500 for $30) and it doesn't have a DVD drive. My kids woul dlike to watch a few of the movies that are now on tape on their PC's (it would eliminate the argument on who gets to watch what first). None of the PC's in the house have DVD drives in them.

I can drop the RR into an old Dell GX200 - P3-866 box I have and use it for video. Any thoughts on this?

[Jerry Jones]

It should work okay.

For those who don't know, the Rainbow Runner by Matrox is a PCI card that captures to the MJPEG .avi file format.

I see no reason why you couldn't use an MPEG encoder to encode those to be VCD compliant MPEG-1 files.

You would only need to make certain that you have the latest driver for the card because the early drivers had some issues.

I took a trip to Seattle in late 2004 and visited one of the Seattle Community College campuses where they have a truly massive video encoding and serving infrastructure.

Believe it or not, one of their crafty technicians had installed a Matrox Rainbow Runner into one of their broadcast arrays and he said it worked great.

I told him I used to own one and he smiled and gave me a "high five."

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Dr Mordrid]

The RRS was one of the better analog capture cards Matrox made. It had better procamps than any of its sucessors (Matrox cheaped out on the Marvels), allowing it to capture from sources that choked its siblings.

I used it to produce many, many VCD and SVCD discs. Those Matrox MJPeg sources can also be used on other systems if you install the PICVideo, Morgan Multimedia or MainConcept MJPeg softcodecs on them.

For encoding I like the MainConcept standalone MPEG encoder. Very fast and it has every setting you'd ever need. TMPGEnc is also nice and has the advantage of some pre-processing filters including many delacers, but it's way slower than MC.

Then again Uleads DVD MovieFactory 4 is a great option that has the MC encoder built right in along with DVD burning capability. My middle son runs it on his Dell PIII-850 laptop and gets great results burning VCD/SVCD and DVD using an external Lite On burner.

Dr. Mordrid

[paulw]

Don't try using it with anything other than Win95 or 98 maybe WinMe

Were a great card in their day. I still have one but haven't used it since I went to DV several years ago..

[Dr Mordrid]

I'd advise Win98 SE instead of ME. ME had a few quirks, to say the least. Mine ran great under SE.

Dr. Mordrid

[Debbie]

I still use RRS for VCDs on a slooooooooooow PC with Win98SE and it works fine.

Debbie

[logic7]

It would definitely run Win98SE. OF the dos based Win32 OS'es, 98SE is the only one I fully trust.


Good. I'll drop it in this weekend and get it going.

[cuddles]

RRS still an icon.
I used huffy at 352x288 (pal) with AV_IO, great quality on playback.
found Nero 5+ best converter/burner.
Cheers

[landrover]

Doc, I always thought that capturing capabilities were equally good with RRS or Marvel G200 / G400. All of those using the Zoran MJPEG encoding chip. G450 eTV was a totally different thing, so I have to agree with you there.

[mits]

Like all the others said, YES.
When i had my MilII/RRS i had produced many VCDs and even DVDs. The mjpg capture on the RRS is hardware based which means it does not need a lot of horsepower.
As it is already stated, the best OS to go with is Win98SE.