All-in-wonder reality or fantasy

[Francky]

I am envisaging a configuration like:

Athlon 900MHz
ASUS A7V
ATI All-in-wonder radeon
IBM Deskstar harddisk (30GB)

I aim at using this thing as a video recorder to record television broadcasts just like one would do with a VHS recorder. Now I get conflicting messages going from

- will not work, unstable software, bad recording/playback quality, system will hang at least once an hour,...

to

- absolutely no problem

Who has concrete experience with this and can provide me with a definite answer or perhaps a better configuration.

Thanks

 

[mrtj]

the mpeg-2 quality is fairly good, though not as good as mjpeg. + at max quality, which i think is 720x576 mpeg2 at 8mb/sec quality you would record about 55 mins in 3.3 ish gigs. that is my experience anyways. i think you can go up to 16 mb /sec though. go with win 2k as your os cos you'll be stuck with fat32's 4gig limit with the other os's

as far as the other stuff goes, ati are very bad at making good drivers especially for win2k, but i havent had many problems.

 

[speedracer]

Well for one, if you plan on recording any TV or other types of video with a decent quality output, I would consider doubling, or if you can afford it even more if this will be its primary purpose. 30 gig of space, when you consider including the OS, installed programs, maybe some MP3's, graphics etc. will not leave you much room at all for your recorded video.

Speedracer

 

[mjdunn]

Get the A7V133 w/ raid
Get another drive and do Raid0 faster and more space.

96.3 % of Statistics are made up.

 

[Guest]

As was mentioned definetley use RAID if you can afford the extra drives.
It would also be advised to have a CPU around 1.2Ghz to avoid dropping frames when capturing and at least 256MB RAM.
Finally use Win2k is you can, it is faster and gets rid of that nasty AVI size limit.

As an example I'm running the following system

Athlon 1.3Ghz
256MB CAS2
ATI AIW Radeon (7075 drivers)
30GB Quantum
Win98/Win2k

Right now I'm capturing TV and converting VHS tapes to CD using MPEG-4. Seriously running out of room, so I'm about to upgrade to a DDR M/B with RAID and get two more HDD, maybe 60GB each.
Otherwise I've had no problems at all with the card, but be warned there is a moderate learning curve when first capturing. I've found that a lot of "problems" blamed on the card come down to user mistakes.
Check out www.rage3d.com for more Radeon info.