[MPlayer-users] Hardware question

[Alessio Sangalli]

Steffen Barszus wrote:

> Wouldn't it be better to buy some MJPEG-Captureboards ? you should 
> definitly
> ask too on the mjpeg-users-mailinglist.


For my own experience, NO

All mjpeg capture boards don't have a magnificent quality; the BEST 
thing is to use a BT84x cap board and encode directly in the format you 
want. BT84x chips, althought don't have an hardware compression chip, 
give a very good image quality and a decent processor can encode mpeg4 
with no troubles at all (a friend of mine encodes 384x288 realtime 
1-pass mpeg4 with 30-40% cpu usage on a pentium4 1.5GHz - that should 
correspond to a 1.2GHz Athlon?)

I don't have any data for full pal capture, because I think it's useless 
to capture such a resolution form a vhs tape - but I guess an athlon 
2000 should be a good buy for the price/performance ratio


bye
as