Ati tv wonder capture quality?

[tjdavis1138]

I have an ATI tv wonder tuner card in my machine which is running Win 2k. I'm going to build another machine and wondered if the capture quality using a Radeon LE and the tv wonder would be as good as an AIW Radeon.

The latest mmc software lets me capture with Mpeg2 on the tv wonder card and I know the AIW captures Mpeg2 as well. Thought I read somewhere that the AIW is hardware encoding/decoding while the tv wonder is not. If I had a fast enough machine would this matter? I'm going to buy a 1.33g Thunderbird with DDR Motherboard.

Thanks,

 

[rbV5]

Cool it supports Mpeg-2 now, I didn't see your cpu listed, but how's your captures now? I would think 1.3 t-bird would be able to handle whatever the max resolution that is supported.

 

[CoMmAnDoMoE2001]

Faster the computer the faster compiling the video to any sorce code
a Tbird 800MHz or higher would do GREAT

 

[tjdavis1138]

I haven't really played with it that much. I have a P2-400 and the quality is ok. I just didn't know if the Rage Theater chip in the AIW had hardware encoding/decoding or if it was all done by the cpu.

Thanks guys.

 

[rbV5]

Well since the cpu requirements go up with the resolution, I would say its mostly cpu.

 

[pidge]

I was under the impression the AIW was software also, that is why it requires at least a Pentium III 500.

 

[tjdavis1138]

I'm going to go ahead and order a Radeon LE and see how it all works when I get my T-bird and motherboard.

Tom

 

[tjdavis1138]

I'm hoping I can get this thing to work with a reasonable amount of stability in Win2k. The **latest** mmc software for the tv wonder is 7.1, but it was released in Oct 2000 and doesn't officially support capture. ATI mentions this and says it will be fully functional in the supported release which will be forthcoming. 8 months later and no official release!!! Typical ATI driver crap..