Recording video to pc

[Fraughton]

I just ordered an AIW radeon 9600 and a 120gb hdd to add to my pc to enable to record tv. I've been researching for a while between the AIW or a standalone card like the hauppage 250.
I know that the hauppage has a hardware encoder so that my cpu will not be a problem in the recording process. I know that the radeon assists in the encoding but it will still be pretty cpu intensive work.

Here are my system specs:
Amd athlon 1700+
512mb pc2100
40gb maxtor, soon to be 120gb seagate w/8mb cache
geforce 4mx 440, soon to be the radeon 9600

I'm just worried about dropped frames in the recording since this isnt exactly a top notch video editing rig. Do you think this system will be good enough to record video at high quality settings?

[RJ]

It depends on the codec used. I used Huffyuv on my PIII 800 and I got only very little framedrops. But I recorded on a separate hard drive. You should do the same. Don't exchange the Maxtor by a Seagate (I wouldn't recommend that anyway, stick with Maxtor or use WD as an alternative), keep the Maxtor as the video capture drive.

RJ

[Fraughton]

I dont know anything about the codecs. Doesnt the ati card come with all the recording software?
What's wrong with the seagate? I've read lots of good about the new 7200.7 drives with the 8mb cache. Their supposed to be quieter and just as fast as the WD. It was also on sale. One issue that I'm afraid of is that the maxtor wont play nice with the seagate. I tried to run a second seagate drive in my system a few years ago just to transfer some files but I couldnt get the system to recognize both drives. With the help of this forum we came to the conclusion that maxtor drives tend not to work with other brand name drives.
Any more info you could give me on codecs and such would be great. As you can probably tell I'm new to the video capture scene.

[SonicVanguard]

There's nothing wrong with Seagate. That's all we use in our studio and that's what I've got in this system. Their new drives are fantastic - fast, quiet and they run cool as long as you've got good ventilation. I wouldn't have put them in our studio if I thought they would fail.

Your ATI card will come with the appropriate viewing and recording software - all you'll need to do is onfigure the recording to use a specific codec. RJ mentioned the Huffyuv codec which is virtually lossless - meaning it uses almost no compression resulting in large video files. You'll probrably be happier using a MPEG-2 codec set at a high quality setting.

Dave.

[RayH]

Fraughton AIW is a good card and the software does an excellent job. How good depends upon what you want to capture and what you expect to do with that captured file.

If you expect to play the file elsewhere than your computer, you are going to need third party software. The best capture modes are ATI proprietary.

ATI software won't capture copyrighted material, such as from VHS or DVD. It gets subject to the copyprotection.

So in either case, you'll need third party.

[RJ]

What's wrong with the seagate?

A couple years ago they made very crappy drives. Every single one failed so far. It does indeed seem that Seagate's current drives are good again, but I don't trust Seagate because of the high failure rate, and anyway I do believe Maxtor is still better.

RJ

[glc]

We've seen some problems with Maxtor recently - all drives run in cycles, I hear that IBM/Hitachi may have their quality issues solved too. I personally would not avoid Seagate, but I'll pick a WD first. ALL hard drives have failures regardless of brand - they are electro-mechanical devices after all.

[Fraughton]

My primary purpose is to record tv. I basically want to use my computer as a vcr to record shows and ballgames while I'm at work. I just want to make sure that my computer will not be limiting my ability to record at a high quality level.

[RayH]

Fraughton For what you want to do, what you have with the addtion of the AIW card is sufficient. But with mo' bigger hard drive, the mo' bigger video files you can handle. And video files get way mo' big!

They have a decent, less than DVD quality that's proprietary. I and my son use our AIWs as TiVo-type TV. One button recording! But I've never tried a game. What happens if it runs overtime?