Marcel Birthelmer wrote: > one solution would certainly be to throw money at the problem, i.e.: > - get more HD space That is probably the best solution, although HDs here in Canada aren't as cheap as they are in the US. For something in the 80G range I'd be looking at $250-ish cdn. I had received some advice to buy "that 80G that xyz is selling for $87!" but for reasons unknown it's not that cheap around here. Not sure why, normally prices are decent here. Oh well. > - get a faster/more CPU(s) If CPU power is available, what would the ideal real-time capture software be? ie: What is the best quality I could expect with real time encoding if I had lots of disk and CPU? > - shell out for an mpeg2 encoder card This is really something I should just do, it would solve a lot of problems. Is anything supported that isn't megabucks? Although, *BREAKING NEWS*, it pays to RTFM... mp1e has a series of filters that I hadn't known about (DUH DUH), and some of them really improve the quality of the final image, making it actually very acceptable without the need to recompress at all. The filters are numbered 1-7, the more complicated ones seem to be higher, it's all in "man mp1e". Filter 3 reads: 3 - Vertical decimation The capture size requested from the driver is twice the nominal height, the filter will average the luminance information from every two adjacent lines and color information from every four. I added this filter to get smoother pictures at low resolution, e.g. 176 x 144, because my video hardware would filter only in horizontal direction and simply drop three or four picture lines. At higher resolution this will combine the top and bottom field of a picture, giving smoother motions and also improving the quality when compressing without motion compensation. Noise is a major enemy of video compression because it sucks stream bandwidth for information which is actually redundant. Averaging has a noise reduction side effect. A negative effect of this filter is that accessing a larger source image will also slightly slow down compression. Using about 4 megabit/s, for 640x480, using this filter, looks very good, straight out of the encoder. With my celeron 500 that's the most complicated filter I can run in real time at this resolution, but I don't have many complaints at all. If I lower the resolution to 352x240 then even at 2Mbit second it looks pretty nice, but visibly lower resolution. I can run more complicated filters at low res, but then the image gets visibly blurry... -- Trevor Boicey, P. Eng. Ottawa, Canada, tboicey@xxxxxxx ICQ #17432933 http://www.brit.ca/~tboicey/ "This donut has purple stuff inside. Purple is a fruit." - Homer
