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I'm planning on building a new computer and I want to make I have the capabilities to capture video and convert VHS to DVD. My question is to those experienced people in these areas, what kind of hardware requirements should I plan for in terms of (1) processor (2) memory (3) capture cards (4) HD capacity etc.
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Hi LeeRobertE,
I'm no expert, 'just did a major pc upgrade.
I got a leadtek winfast 2000 xp delux capture card for gbp35 !!! (about usd50). It does software mpeg2 encoding but I try to use huffyuv or morgan jpeg instead as it allows better quality editing followed by a seperate mpeg2 encoding stage. It came bundled with windvd 5, ulead dvd movie factory and ulead videostudio 7(se), pretty good value for money. I don't know if a hardware mpeg2 capture card is worth going for as the quality may be significantly inferior to that of a post capture encode and editing an mpeg2 file is much harder than an avi file. A hardware mpeg2 encoder may be desirable as tmpgenc software takes a fairly long time.
You hard disk requirement depends on the duration of your capture. I have found mpeg2 to need about 50 mbytes per min, mjpeg 200 and huffyuv 500, so an hour of huffyuv needs about 30 gigs. Allow 2 1/2 to 3 times that for editing and encoding and a 240 gig hd will allow about 3 hours of the highest quality work.
If you capture and process shorter segments you can use a smaller hd or store more mpeg2 data. You can capture vhs at a much lower rate as there is little to be gained in going higher than 352 x 240. A seperate hd partition or a seperate hd should be used for video use to avoid fragmentation.
I hope you get a few replies from people who know more about this. -
Minimum hardware specs
2 GHz CPU
512 MB RAM
2 Hard Drives; 7200 RPM, 8MB Buffer. 2nd should be as large as possible – at least 80GB.
I don’t use an AIW card. I hook my VCR (and videocam) into a Canopus ADVC-100. From there I run the video into the system via firewire; plug into a Belkin add-in card. I run the audio in using the line-in port on my sound card. You could also use the firewire audio stream if desired.
You really should beef up on RAM. You will notice a big difference between 512 MB & 1GB when rendering.
Don’t forget a good 24-bit sound card!Comment
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