On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, Bernhard Marx wrote: >I want to use the card among other things to capture VHS video data to >cdrom. It schould also capture from TV. Possible resolution should at >least be DVD 720x576 or better PAL 786x576 at 25 fps. Terratec claims >that it can record in DVD resolution but says nothing about fps-rate. I think that any decent PCI-TV card will do the job. I have not-so-new BT878-based card and it easily does 768x576 @ 25 fps with fairly good quality too. The actual quality limit is caused by VHS tapes. Direct recording from air gives much better image quality, provided the antenna signal is good. However, computer easily causes noise for weak signals if you use the card's own tuner. I suggest getting a VCR, attaching antenna to VCR, and wiring composite signal from VCR to TV card (e.g. from the SCART connector). For me it makes ten times better image for some channels. You could get broken VCRs (with good tuner) for (practically) free. One thing to consider is whether you want stereo sound: not all cards can do that. But if you use VCR tuner, and the VCR supports stereo, then it's not a problem. Audio comes directly from VCR to sound card line in. > AMD Duron 700 MHz > 775 MB RAM > hdparm says buffered disk reads are 12.19 MB/sec > S3Virge graphics card with 4MB > 2 GB of free harddisk space. > >I want to upgrade the harddisk soon and eventually want to upgrade cpu Some programs may be fast enough to record lightly compressed video with your computer, but streamer certainly isn't (although it's otherwise good). jpeg-compressed PAL quality takes about 2*60% of CPU power on my Dual PentiumIII 933 MHz. You might opt to use uncompressed video if you buy enough hard disk space. Any new hard disk (even slower 5400 RPM disks) have write performance around 40 MB/s which is enough even for uncompressed video (which needs theoretically about 16 MB/s). But do not use journaling filesystems: I tried reiserfs and it kills performance. 50 MB/s disk was not enough. One nice solution is to get two cheap IDE-disks and set up them as RAID-0, which doubles the transfer rate--in principle. But it doesn't work with Intel chipsets (VIA is ok, though). Also, if you use SCSI, make sure it's not Adaptec, they don't seem to work with TV-cards (at least AIC-7899 doesn't). >Would the Terratec Cinergy 600 TV be a good choice for me? Are there >other alternatives available below 100 EUR? Would even a cheap card Yes, the TV card is not a problem. Any _supported_ model should do. But you probably need faster CPU/hard disk to record full PAL quality. Before buying card, make sure it works in Linux. Not all do (and different cards may have same label in the box). Ask if you can return the card in case it doesn't work.
