How bad will PC performance suffer?

[Raterus]

Hello,

I'm starting to become interested in capturing video through my PC. I want to tape shows on TV and put them on DVD. I first thought about a DVR, but the technology is so new, I think I'm going to wait for now. I also don't want to be messing with the DVR's video editing capabilities, if I can get the video's on my PC, that is ideal.

What I can do though is get a nice capture card and capture the shows through my computer, but I'm concerned that it will greatly affect my PC's performance when it is capturing. I know the capture card will offset most if not all of the processor usage, but what about the hard-drive access. I want to capture in a pretty decent resolution, but don't want to be dealing with dropped frames or anything.

I only have a puny 900mhz CPU too, which complicates matters. What will this do to my computer, can I at least do basic things while a show is being captured? Browse web, open little programs here or there, etc.?

I'd greatly appreciate anyone's comments on this!
--Michael

[SallyDog]

I would seriously doubt that you will be able to capture on your computer without dropping frames, even when you have NO other programs in operation. You're going to need more processing power to successfully capture to your hard drive

:(

[Axed]

Well, you could get one of those onboard mpeg2 encoder capture cards. I suppose your processor shouldnt matter much if its using the onboard mpeg2 chip.

[lark]

do you want to capture to a lossless format and edit the captures later or would you like to capture directly to mpeg2?

in 1st case the HD speed is definitely the limiting factor (if you use decent image size) and opening even a small prog from the SAME hd can cause a frame to be dropped.

in the 2nd case you need CPU (or a HW card) to do the encoding on the fly.

regards
t :)

[Raterus]

Capturing to mpeg2 would be fine with me as the only edits I'd need to do to the final product are commercials. So if I did have a mpeg2 capture card, and a decent hard drive I'm writing too, do you think I'd still be looking at dropped frames?

Thanks for all your replies so far!
--Michael

[ronnylov]

Some people that owns the Hauppage PVR-150 /PVR-250 /PVR-350 say that they can even play games and capture at the same time without dropping frames so I don't think you will have any problems if you get one of theese.

[Boulder]

Capturing with a PVR-250 required about 2-3% of CPU cycles on my P4@2.76GHz so it's not much. I used WinTVCap so there was no video displayed which would have eaten more cycles.

However, I used to capture in PicVideo MJPEG on my 900MHz Duron at full resolution on Win98SE so you might want to give it a go. If you have Win98SE, you could use the last v1.5-branch VirtualDub and VfW drivers for the capture card to get better performance. Also make sure your HD is in UDMA mode.

[Raterus]

Thanks, I was actually looking at the Hauppage cards right after the suggestion for a mpeg2 card. Are these pretty good, any other recommendations for an mpeg2 card?

[Boulder]

I can recommend the PVR-250. I got one second-hand which means the price wasn't bad either.

Just don't use Hauppauge's own software for capturing or at least tweak the internal filtering so that you won't get oversmoothed captures;)

[zilog jones]

I can capture full size PAL on my PIII-933MHz with Huffyuv and MJPEG without dropping any frames! And I'm using it in Win2k with VirtualVCR.

Though as others said, I hope you have a modern 7200RPM hard disk. Also, some older motherboard chipsets (like the VIA Apollo Pro in my PC) need some tweaking if you want it to work properly.