Re: Why no TV?

Brian Henderson <BrianL.Henderson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Aug 2005 14:47:06 -0700, archmage@xxxxxxxxxx (Nate Edel)
> wrote:
> >Depends on the speed of the machine and the quality of the DVD desired.
> >Modern (Pentium 4/Athlon/etc) machines are more than fast enough to do
> >moderate-quality software MPEG2 encoding on the fly, although slower and/or
> >multipass encodings will produce both smaller and better quality output.
>
> My machine can convert AVI to MPEG2 faster than real time, that isn't
> really an issue. It's the fact that some analog-to-digital boxes will
> only rip to AVI, thus requiring at least one extra step to have it DVD
> compliant.

I've never seen a card that doesn't support one or both of the VFW or WDM
APIs; there are plenty of programs that will take an incoming VFW or WDM
stream and do the compression on the fly. The original video stream will
never touch the disk, whether it's in an AVI-friendly format or not. They'll
also automatically create a DVD from the stream, although there's an
intermediate authoring step if you want more than a minimal menu and
chapters every n minutes.

In fact, while I've got a card that allegedly does various compressions in
hardware, I've yet to be able to get it to do anything useful with them
other than bring things in as VFW/WDM and compress to disk in software.

I haven't used many of the external boxes, but I'd imagine most of them
support one or both of the standard APIs.

--
Nate Edel http://www.cubiclehermit.com/

"I do have a cause, though. It is Obscenity. I'm for it." - Tom Lehrer
.

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