320x240 is pretty close to actual VHS resolution.

hi

my advice may be incorrect as it's a long time since
i even came across a win2k machine but i seem to
remember there being issues with IRQ sharing or
IRQ balancing with that O/S. You may need to disable
ACPI and re-install it as a regular PC rather than an
ACPI PC.

perhaps relevant though is that your setup may be
a little slow to handle raw video streams direct to
disk. it may be trial and error on your part to find
a resolution which will be satisfactory without frame
drops.

somewhat related to this, in the past i have found
a satisfactory solution to your problem using a hardware
mpeg card (eg PVR-350) to capture to disk within
linux. that would record directly as MPEG2 ready for
DVD (no transcoding required).

Later i would edit the stream in XP using
womble DVD. this provides a good solution
IMHO. AVIDEMUX may be an option but womble is
easy to use.

you may want to see if there are any PVR-350s on ebay
which i assume people are offloading relatively cheaply
these days.

bye

GXL750 wrote:

320x240 is pretty close to actual VHS resolution.

NO WRONG

720x240 (480i interlaced) != 320x240
plus you can deinterlace a good 720x480 image out of 30fps stuff

I would use Virtualdub for capture, and my experience with BT878 is how unbearably noisy it was for video... try the others you've got first

@sklawz: Do you think that those IRQ sharing issues would dissapear in Windows XP?

Also, I think that speed won't be an issue... I remember capturing without frame drops with my old Athlon 1 Ghz. I was using huffyuv codec, that reduced the video stream enough to cope with bandwidth limitations.

Also, I don't want to buy another video capture device (in fact, when this task is done, I'm getting rid of both the video capture card and the VHS video).

@leileilol: I thought that USB devices would impose a bigger CPU load, with more frame dropping, so if I resort to one of those things, I would use a better computer ( = SATA HDDs, dual core, etc). Do they offer better quality than the older BT878? Will performance be enough to capture video without frame dropping?

hi

memory is vague but i do recall seeing
problems from the win2k era but not
after with winxp. with XP you probably
should ensure ACPI plus IO-APIC is
enabled and not just the legacy XT-PIC.

Your mainboard probably has both
options somewhere.

XP should in theory respect the int
order as found in your manual where
it will suggest which slot is shared with
usb.

one thing to remember though is that
pci cards with more than one function
that demands an irq will also use the
next irq slot along the chain.

bye

edit:spelling