Well I guess its time to thowing my 2p worth...
Neill Newman wrote:
Syd Hancock wrote:
Does anyone here have any experience of digitising analogue video in linux? I am looking for advice on what capture card (mid-range e.g. Pinnacle DC10plus) to use and possibly a tv tuner card.
In particular, if anyone does use a DC10plus I'd be very interested to make contact as I'd like to see one in use if possible.
As Adrian said, we used to use winTV cards about 4 years ago, the ones without tuners were very cheap (about £25 from CPC) and the quality was VHS like..
VHS like isn't really a very good description of the quality. The resolution of these cards is full broadcast PAL or NTSC as is the frame rate (not VHS). The cards can have poor signal to noise ratios. Poor is a bit subjective and depends on what your going to do with it. If your just going to watch TV on them, then I'd say the noise level is fine, even good. But if your doing broadcast quality or image processing then it's not so hot. It also seems to depend on the motherboard you plug them into. Another thing to watch is on one chipsets the DMA engine will start to drop parts of scan lines if the PCI bus becomes overloaded. I've *never* seen this happen on a BX chipset, but if occasionally get it with an AMD761. It maybe I have something hogging the bus and a bios tweek will fix it.
They have no video compression hardware. But they can do colour space conversions in hardware.
Firewire capture from a DV source seems to be popular under linux these days. And it's where I'd look next. It may be a bit bleeding edge so your YMMV.
Adrian is doing image processing, so video quality is of top
priority, but for the average person the winTV cards (and similar) will do all you want...
Depends what you want. If you want to record near broadcast quality stuff to MPEG or the like, they aren't what you want.
Also can anyone comment on the current state of play with ATI graphic cards and linux? Some of their cards seem to do all that I want but...
it depends on what ATI graphics cards you are thinking of.. a few years ago ATI refused to release the spec of their cards, and some of them don't work too well.. best to check with the Xfree86.org people
If your referring to the "all-in-wonder" then I think the name aptly applies to what will happen if you actually make it work. Seriously I've seen some very buggy servers for ATI cards but not for the most resent cards. I know someone with one of these (under windoze mostly) , if I remember I'll ask how it fairs under linux. I think the radon has some 3D support BTW.
If you've not seen it , this is a good place to start:-
Mike
hth Sz
Thanks Syd
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