AIW 7500 Video capture

[Hrock34]

I am thinking about getting an AIW 7500 for my old computer to use it to play DVD and divx movies on my TV, and to record stuff from the TV. I am worried that the computer won't be powerful enough to really do waht I want though. Its a PII 300 with 128 RAM. I know that I won't be able to to MPEG2 capture, but will I be able to capture in other formats (Like ATI's propriatary one)? I assume that the playback would be OK, since it was the last time I used it a year ago with teh old TNT that's in there now.
Anyone have any insight or experience?
THanks
H

 

[rbV5]

It will be a real challenge for playback as well as capture with rig specs like that. ATI's new VCR format is just a superset of MPEG-2, so thats out of the question, you could perhaps capture to MPEG-1 or some AVI codec, but likely your ide subsystem wont handle the bitrate for even that.

My advice is to get a cheap PCI TV card in FS/T forum, and stick it into your rig to play around with video capture. The plus for working in an underpowered environment is that you will be forced to use a variety of techniques to get any kind of quality with your captures, and you'll learn the software/workflow in the process. PC Video is a lot of fun, start cheap and you'll get a good idea of where to spend your money when you want to build a decent Cap/edit rig.

A card like the AIW 7500 IMHO would be a waste in your current rig, you wouldn't be able to use a good portion ofthe feature set, and the portion you could use could be had with any cheap PCI TV card(make sure there are drivers available for your OS) and VirtualDub at a fraction of the cost.