[MPlayer-users] mencoder video card recommendation

[D Richard Felker III]

On Fri, Mar 19, 2004 at 01:56:17AM +0000, Martin Collins wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Mar 2004 16:27:03 -0800
> "Andrew J. Yeckel" <ay2b at queue.org> wrote:
> 
> > so I'd like to know what the "best" solution is, even
> > if I don't end up using it.  I'm looking for an answer of the form
> > "use X" not of the form "don't use Y".
> 
> For editability raw video, DV or mjpeg are the best options AFAIK.
> Raw video requires huge quantities of disc space (~70GB/h?) but is
> easily captured with any cheap TV card. Your final DVD will have the
> best possible quality as it will only need encoding once.

This depends. Some raw capture cards (notably many of the bt8x8 based
ones) have horrible noise in the signal they capture. This looks bad,
and it wastes lots of bits when encoding your final mpeg4 or dvd. One
of the most important things is finding a card that doesn't introduce
noise. And unfortunately I can't help, since mine _does_ have bad
noise. :(

Rich