[MPlayer-users] Re: Which TV card ?

[Tuukka Toivonen]

On Thu, 21 Aug 2003, Fabio Papa wrote:

>> b.) DivX will not allow me to cut out commercials because it is not really
>>     supported by most video editors on Linux, knows the hell, why... :-/
>That's plain not true. Avidemux can do that happily, with frame precision.

Cinelerra also *might* support MPEG-4 in AVI (of which DivX is a subset),
if you get it running on your system.

>> So I will have to look for something different, which does only very slight
>> compression to keep most of the quality, but still strong enough to get 2-3
>> hours onto 15GB HDD space - in a file format which can be edited
>> afterwards.

Well, forget about motion estimation (which is the main reason for
efficiency of MPEG-1,2,4,...). JPEG is the only codec which might be fast
enough, but at least libjpeg-mmx would be too slow for your 800 MHz P3.
Maybe there are faster jpeg codecs in libavcodec.

>> What will give "best" results? I would prefer to keep full PAL resolution
>> as long as possible.
>Keeping full PAL is a strong task. My P4 2.4Ghz struggles with it, so I don't
>think it's possible for you. But you have to always keep in mind what your
>target is: I was like you before, when I realized I was going to burn VCDs
>only at 352x288, I started to capture at that res. Work like charm.

And I used to capture uncompressed 320x240 on Pentium plain 166 MHz.
Dropped frames now and them, though...

>Also, on a final note, pay attention at the AVI dimensions: if you pass the
>2Gb file size, some programs could have problems, and if you pass 4Gb, you
>will definitely have problems with avidemux.

And with JPEG compression 4 GB is just too small (15-20 GB might be
realistic size for two hour movie with full PAL resolution with only slight
JPEG compression. You can always increase JPEG compression, it won't be
even slower, but the image quality gets worse and it would be better to use
smaller resolution in the first place).