tv capture

[jay75]

If I am doing tv capture on a pentium 3 933mhz at 720 by 480, and the cpu usage is 100%, how much better performance would i be able to get by using a sound card instead of on-board audio? Also, what minimum specs should the sound card have?

system: p3 933mhz, 512mb ram, 20gb 7200rpm hdd(9.5ms access time, 23MB/s sequential write)

 

[NuNuNYC]

You should get a noticeable difference as the sound decoder won't be handled by the CPU anymore, but by a hardware decoder located on the sound card.. There really are no minimum specs.. A SoundBlaster Live 5.1 is fine or anything on those lines. Of course don't use a SoundBlaster AWE or something of that extinction... Your computer may be a bit slow when encoding the TV capture to your computer. You may get video/audio desynchronization because of all the taxation on such a slow CPU.. The faster the CPU the better the FPS, basically meaning the smoother video/sound recording you get... PM me and lemme know how your set up goes and if you get good TV recording...

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: jay75
If I am doing tv capture on a pentium 3 933mhz at 720 by 480, and the cpu usage is 100%, how much better performance would i be able to get by using a sound card instead of on-board audio? Also, what minimum specs should the sound card have?

system: p3 933mhz, 512mb ram, 20gb 7200rpm hdd(9.5ms access time, 23MB/s sequential write)

Video takes vastly more time/CPU than audio to encode, so I suggest simply spending $80 on the Hauppauge PVR-250 MPEG2 encoder-tuner card. It's a TV tuner that will encode (using its' on-board CPU) the video, and your computer will handle the audio by itself, which is a minor load. As an added bonus, the quality is typically far higher than you'll get with other (software-based) solutions, and your P3/933 is easily fast enough to handle it and have plenty of CPU bandwidth left over.

I'm not familiar with any sound cards with hardware audio encoding in the consumer (under $100) sector.