Within the next month or so, I am planning to purchase a new computer. The primary purpose, besides just having a faster computer, is to convert my collection of VHS tapes to DVD. Along those lines, I purchased a TV tuner card recently to test out the setup. I currently have the following setup: CPU : Pentium II, 266 MHz RAM : 328 mb TV Tuner : I/O Magic PC PVR Primary Video Card : ATI Technologies Inc 3D Rage Pro 215GP (PCI) Secondary Video Card : NVidia Riva128 (AGP) Disk Drive(s) : Slow < 7200 RPM SCSI and IDE drives TV Application : xawtv Capture Application : streamer I was pleasantly suprised first with the hardware support and second a the quality of some sample movies I recorded. Note that while I recorded only at 15 fps and a resolution of 320x240, my old setup seemed to perform rather well. So onto the new computer, I would like to solicit advice on what components matter most. Within a given budget, I can purchase a machine posssessing two 2.0 GHz Xeon processors and 512 Mb of RAM, or trade one of the processors for another 512 Mb of memory. Can anyone state what the impact of the trade off might be. Along with recording at a relatively high frame rate (24 fps ?), I would like to perform some basic editing. Wipes and functions like that are nice, but the real goal would be to eliminate sections of video, commercials for example. Then there is the matter of disk space and speed. My current plan is to run the OS on a dedicated (physical drive) and therefore based on my understanding ... the speed of that drive is not so critical. However, my research indicates the speed of the drive I record to is important. So, the trade off I am considering there is an 18 Gb, 10000 RPM, SCSI drive or a larger, say 80 Gb, 7500 RPM IDE drive on the second IDE channel. While we are talking about IDE channels, is there a negative impact in putting the DVD writer on the second channel along with the data drive. Or, will the writing process be interrupted by taking the data off the drive. I realize this has been a long winded message, but any input would be greatly appreciated. -- R. Wayne McCorkle EMail: rwmccorkle@xxxxxxxxxxxx
