I have recently bought this card and overall I am quite pleased with it, but i have encountered some issues. The most annoying is when i try to acces the captured video files with the explorer in WinXP SP1. When I click on one of the files CPU usage goes to 100% and stays there and the windows explorer stops responding and must be shut down in task manager. The files work fine if I acces them with another application (powerdvd, dvdstation, winfastDVD or WinDVD) Anybody else had this problem or know how to solve it? I am also wondering what capture settings are the best to use. I find the capturing to be rather demanding on the CPU. I do most my recordings with 6000kb/sec and the quality set to 500 at 720*576 25 fps. This gives ok quality and the CPU runs at around 90% (Athlon XP2000). Higher quality skips frames, and thats useless. Any suggestions on how to improve recording quality? How does increase in kb/sec affect quality? Any help will be appreciated.
The Biggest Factor in the Software that Effects the Quality is the Bitrate used...What Compression does is Throw away Video Information and the Lower the Bitrate the More Video Infomation is Thrown away and the Higher the Bitrate the Video Information is Kept which in Turn Gives you better Quality But also Bigger File sizes...When Captureing make sure any Backroung programs are Shut down ,Like your Anti-Virus and anything else you have Running in your Task Bar that is Not needed for Capture, this will Leave more CPU Power for Compressing the Video Stream..The only other thing you can do is to Get a Faster CPU or if you Know what you are Doing you can allways Overclock your CPU say 10%-15% which will Give you a 10-15% Faster CPU Speed but if you are useing a Palimino core Athlon I wouldn"t Try it unless you have a Kick ass Heatsink/Fan because the Palimino is a very Hot CPU as it uses a higher Voltage that the Thurobred and Barton Core CPU"s and the Palimino uses the Much Hottter 0.18 Micron Fabrication Proscess...If you have enough drive Space you can also Try Captureing to a Low Compression AVI format and then use a High Quality Mpeg encoder to encode the captured files to Mpeg2 ,This will produce Better Quality Because Mpeg capture Programs are Not Very efficient with the Bitrate so it uses a Much Higher Bitrate than a good Standalone Mpeg encoder would and Achieve better Quality....Cheers
Thanks for the advice minion. Have anybody tried DVDshrink for recorded files? I have only used it for DVDs, which works great, but I couldnt figure out how to compress files on the HD. G
You Can"t use it for that and even if it could I wouldn"t use it because it really isn"t a Very Good encoder, Oh It is better than the Other No Brainer DVD Backup Programs But it still doesn"t compare to a high Quality Mpeg2 Encoder....
