MPEG2 and Video Quality

[idfubar]

I'm looking at getting a All-In-Wonder Radeon or Radeon 8500DV... Both of these cards support encoding at 720x480@30fps in software.

I'm mostly interested in VCR-like capabilities, and I am concerned about video quality. How is the record quality of these two cards (any difference between them)? Does anyone know how much processing speed is required to record without dropped frames? Are there any cards that have hardware MPEG2 encoding support? How much do these cards sell for, and how is their recording quality when compared to the ATI solutions?

Thanks in advance for any help. The Anandtech community rocks!

-Rishi

 

[laugh]

I don't think 8500DV is superior over AIW Radeon in video capturing speed. AIW Radeon can capture MPEG2 at real time with very good quality, but when I did the capturing, I noticed tiny frame drops (it says <1% frame drop, but normally it's 0%) when I switch to other programs, so I assume you should let the MMC run without interrupting it by all means.

 

[idfubar]

Any more input?

 

[imgod2u]

720x480? Is this true? I would think my TV-Wonder is capable of the same capture functions as the AIW and I can only capture 640x240 max. This is driver limited and not limited by any programs. Could someone clarify?

 

[CQuinn]

Yes, you can set the capture (on both the AIW Radeon and the 8500DV) to 720x480,
but its not worth it if you are only capturing from TV.
You need a really fast CPU to do realtime encoding of a resolution that high, and NTSC TV is
broadcast at a much lower resolution (more like 352x240).

The only benefit to capturing at a higher resolution is if you want to archive the footage
in another format (like DivX), and want to get really good quality during the second encoding.
Otherwise you just end up with huge files that are little better for casual watching than if
you had chosen a lesser setting in the first place.

If you are just gonna use it like a VCR, and delete the shows after you record and watch them,
a setting of (352x240 or 352x480) is still good for viewing, and takes less overhead from the
system so you can tweak the quality in other ways (like increasing the bitrate).

Otherwise; I upgraded from an AIW Radeon to the 8500DV, and the picture quality for
the TV Tuner looks much better on the 8500DV, but I'm still tweaking the capture
quality to get it to look any better than I was getting with the AIWR. THe 8500DV
comes with Multimedia Center 7.5, which helps a great deal with capture settings
and running the Digital VCR.