Can I use this card for mpeg capture from my camcorder

-- Aji Paul (ajipaul@yahoo.com), April 11, 2001

Answers

In a nut shell,...yes. Regardless of your intended need, you will find lots of information on the topic in the archives.

-- me (snake_mountain@hotmail.com), April 11, 2001.

You might find the following web pages helpful as they have a lot of info on using ATI cards. members.home.net/richa www.pcphotovideo.com They don't cover camcorder capture per se, but you should be able to get some helpful information out of them. I have an ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon and these pages helped me the most when I was starting.

-- Jason Shumate (Jason.Shumate@sita.int), April 11, 2001.

It really depends on which "pro" model you have. If you are talking about the AIW PRO with 8mb video ram I would suggest it would be a tall order. That card is very limited compared to the "other" Pro model which is the AIW 128 Pro. That card has 32 mb video ram and is a more feature rich and powerful card. If I remember, the original "pro" model All In Wonder was based on the Mach 64 chipset. While the Rage Pro is based on a 128 bit rage chipset.

To do "real time" mpeg encoding you "may" be ok with the smaller "pro" model if you stick to VCD or less mpeg. (1.15 Mb/s and 1/4 screen resolution.) But anything higher, you'll need something better.

The biggest thing that will affect your success is the speed of your processor. Real time mpeg encoding will really tax your CPU. 500 Mhz would be the minimum and you'd want either an Intel P3 or an Athlon type CPU. If you want to do higher res. like SVCD with bigger frames and higher bit rate .. you'd need something like a 700 plus Mhz cpu to get satisfactory results. Check my pcphotovideo.com web site for samples of VCD and SVCD mpeg made with an ATI AIW Rage 128. (the model video card one down from the Rage Pro model)

-- rich (rich@pcphotovideo.com), April 11, 2001.

The people at www.videoguys.com do not seem to have a high regard for ATI All-in-Wonder products in general. See what they have to say.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), April 14, 2001.