[MPlayer-users] tv card basics (summary)

[Martin Collins]

On Wed, 27 Nov 2002 07:50:25 +0100
Marcin Bukat <wodz at soliton.ch.pw.edu.pl> wrote:

> I've found this thread usfull since I would like to buy tv card. So 
> after reading this I can imagine that:
> 1. Vendor dosn't realy matter. All Conexant bt878 cards gives
> similar quality of grabing tv. But you've mention about different
> tuner quality. Which one would you prefer? Philips, Samsung?

I have no experience of bt8x8 cards but my Marvel has a Philips and
gives an excellent picture.

> 2. Grabing 1/2 pal is what such card can *realy* do.

That's the official spec, but with the right motherboard etc. you may
well get more.

> 3. It is recommended to firs video with something not so CPU
> intensive (mjpg or another one is better?) 'on the fly' and than
> reencode to divX.

Or get a card with hardware mjpeg.

> How many disk space do I need to record ~90min movie in this way?

Full PAL mjpeg about 14GB. Half PAL mjpeg less than half that. you
can trade off size against quality to some degree.

> Is Celeron 1.1GHz sufficient?

Full PAL with a hardware mjpeg card yes. For half PAL with a bt8x8 yes.

> What is quality of recorded material?

I get mjpeg which is excellent, almost as good as the broadcast.

> Would someone be so kind and put a few samples somewhere with small 
> comment how this samples were obtained?

I posted two second samples of full and half PAL mjpeg yesterday:
ftp.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/incoming/buggy_lavrec_mjpeg/
You will need lavplay http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net to play the full
PAL (d1) file, mplayer can't handle it yet.

Martin