Capture and DVD Quality

Post by **Ken Berry** » Fri Aug 05, 2005 10:24 pm

Hmmm. Not sure what to suggest now. The Sempron is not a particularly powerful chip, but it should still suffice, especially with your other computer resources. I still occasionally use both VS 7 and now 8 to capture successfully on an old laptop which only has a PIII 1 GHz CPU and 512 MB, though I have to make sure other background programs are switched off.

As for capture in the smaller format on USB not stressing the CPU, well it wouldn't if you think about it. As I said in an earlier post, high quality digital video capture is a resource-intensive process. USB 1 simply can't transfer at a speed and quality/format level that can feed the computer's ability to produce a high quality capture. USB on the other hand which, IIRC, operates at about 40 times the speed of USB 1, can do so.

But it still sounds strange that your CPU is going up to 95% - 100%. Do you have any other programs running in the background, including anti-virus or firewall?

THoff · Post by **THoff** » Fri Aug 05, 2005 10:44 pm

I did a little research, and the CompUSA Video Grabber is actually a VC-211A made by ActionTech.

There are two caveats:

1. The device is powered by the USB bus, and any drops in voltage would likely cause a disconnect (as could other USB devices by using some of the USB bandwidth).

2. According to ActionTech, the device captures at either 352x288 or 640x480, and no mention is made of hardware encoding*. Therefore, if you are trying to capture at 720x480 in MPEG2 format, then your CPU would have to resize the video on-the-fly, and transcode it in realtime. Given that it's a Sempron, that probably won't work reliably.

My recommendation would be to capture at 640x480 in AVI format (uncompressed or using the Huffyuv codec), and transcode to MPEG2 after the video has been captured.

Note: CompUSA's claim of 720x480 at 30fps using USB 1.1 is completely unrealistic. I don't know what they are smoking over there...

ronack · Post by **ronack** » Fri Aug 05, 2005 10:57 pm

The PC is a web server so there is a lot going on in the back ground. I'll have to play with it a bit and see what I can come up with. What was interesting was the Microsoft Movie Maker didn't drop out. So maybe Video Studio uses a more resources than Movie Maker.