Laptop users - can you capture losslessly?

[NerdWithNoLife]

I captured some video to my desktop through the S-video on my consumer DV camera using the Lagarith lossless codec. To me it was noticeably better than DV. Incidently, unless there is some processing I'm unaware of: it was capturing progressive frames at 30p! 29.97p to be exact - but on my low end camcorder!

I'd like to "take it to the street" if that is possible. So if you happen to have a laptop with S-video in will you please do the following? Install Lagarith lossless codec, or even Huffyuv, capture in that codec with VirtualDub and see if your laptop can handle it without dropping frames.

If it can, I'd like to know what kind of laptop it is as I may be shopping for a laptop soon. Much obliged.

[zilog jones]

Any modern laptop should have the processing power to do this. However I don't know of any that have video inputs - you'd probably have to get a capture device for it (PCMCIA card, USB, firewire, etc.)

[JohnnyMalaria]

FYI, the S-video signal is derived from the DV recording. It may look better but the same artifacts will still be there but somewhat masked due to the smoothing of the DV to S-video step. The S-video quality cannot be better than the DV. The exception to this is if the signal is live (i.e., direct from the camera and not tape). The apparent improvement in quality is likely due to smoothing of the chroma signal by the S-video step and then capturing at 4:2:2.

In all probability, you'd achieve the same effect by capturing DV and converting to Lagarith.

[Nealhon]

I have a Dell 1.8 GHz 1 GB DDR ram laptop and it works with capturing using Huffyuv. I originally bought a cheap, low quality USB 2.0 capturing card for it, but it SUCKED. It couldn't even handle playing audio without having choppy playback outside of the software that came with it (which was horrible software).

My friend had a decent external USB 2.0 card that he let me try for a while, and it worked fine with my setup.

[NerdWithNoLife]

The exception to this is if the signal is live (i.e., direct from the camera and not tape).

Exactly - live capture. That is the idea. I do understand that it would be a waste to do so with a taped DV recording that can already be decoded as is. But to circumvent DV compression all together: that would be really cool - which is why I'm asked whether a laptop can do this. It is portable.

[JohnnyMalaria]

I expect that you'll need an external drive since capture to the internal OS drive on a laptop is very susceptible to dropped frames - and that's with DV. Lossless video would be even more susceptible.

[Dark Shikari]

Lagarith on YV12 mode should do the capturing fine on any modern CPU--I would strongly recommend a 7200 RPM hard disk though for this, as 5400RPM is pushing it.

Note that Lagarith uses a lot more CPU for decoding than encoding.