Can I use TV tuner/capture card to make great VCDs?

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I came across this site titled "Making VideoCDs on a Budget" (www.geocities.com/cplarosa/video/capture.htm). It interests me because I don't have a budget for an expensive hardware encoder to make VCDs. I am new at this and have these questions:

1. Can I use the Pinnacle Studio PCTV to capture a full 576 lines of PAL video at full frame rate (60 fields per sec)? 2. For a 1.5-hour movie captured into YUY2 AVI, how much disk space will this eat up? 3. For a 1.5-hour movie captured into YUY2 AVI, how long does it take for an encoder like, say, Xing, to encode in MPEG1? 4. Will I be able to make quality VCDs with my config: Pentium II 350 MMX, ~5Gig free space, 98 Meg RAM, 8 Meg OEM AGP graphics card, Sound Blaster Live! Value, HP CD Writer? 5. Do all BT848-based cards have the same capabilities in terms of capture resolution, framerate, and quality.

Any responses much appreciated. Thank you.

-- Froilan (fcyy@yahoo.com), July 05, 2000

Answers

yes!

-- asif bhatti (bhatti_1000@brain.net.pk), July 05, 2000.

1. Your gonna have a hard time capturing raw AVIs at full resolution. I haven't tried it yet, mostly because I've seen posts claiming anywhere from 7MB/s to 30MB/s throughput being required for full res capture! You should experiment for yourself at full res, then try half res (352 x 576) and CIF (352 x 288). 2. At about 10MB/s, it's not going to fit on your 5gigs of free space. You can capture a bit, encode, then capture some more. 3. Count on about 9:1 encode times(!) 4. Yes 5. I don't have first hand experience here but I should think they would.

HTH, Frank

-- Frank Marshall (new_wave@one.net.au), July 07, 2000.


Yes you can capture with PCTV but always take into consideration that PCTV captures and saves files as AVI. AVI is not a good type of file format in terms of size because a good AVI with 8 minutes of video and audio can take up 2GB of Hard disk space and REMEMBER THAT WINDOWS 95 FAT16 HAS A SINGLE FILE SIZE LIMIT OF 2GB AND WINDOWS 98 FAT32 HAS 4GB. Better look for a straight MPEG-1 capture and encoder software. Cineplayer DVR is a good choice, it will work with your PCTV and I have proven it.

-- Leo Medina (pipo_medina@lycos.com), January 10, 2001.

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