[MPlayer-users] mencoder video card recommendation

[Jack]

Andrew J. Yeckel wrote:

>On Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 07:00:42PM -0500, D Richard Felker III wrote:
>  
>
>>On Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 11:20:08PM +0000, Martin Collins wrote:
>>    
>>
>>Well raw uncompressed capture is much better unless you have a slow
>>cpu. If you want to encode to something of reasonable size in
>>realtime, having DV to start with is a liability since you have to
>>spend cpu time decoding too before you can encode it.
>>    
>>
Agreed.  Capture raw from the card and encode it in software.  Cards 
based on the bt8x8 chips are plentiful, cheap, and well supported in 
linux.  Some people complain about them putting noise in the picture 
though.  I don't see that at all on mine (which has a 878A), but there 
are a metric asston of people making these cards, and I am perfectly 
willing to believe that most of them suck.

>>Also, NTSC DV is absolutely horrible unacceptable quality (4:1:1
>>sampling). So do NOT use a DV-based capture card if you'll be
>>capturing any NTSC content.
>>    
>>
>
>I am capturing NTSC.
>I'm
>looking for an answer of the form "use X" not of the form "don't use Y". 
>Over time on this list, I've seen lots of "Don't use NTSC/DV", but
>nothing of the form "Use X instead". 
>  
>
I would recommend grabbing raw, and encoding to HuffYUV in realtime.  
Anime fansubbers swear by it because it's pretty much lossless.  In my 
own experience, it only eats around 20% of the CPU on my Athlon XP 
1700.  I'll see if I get an example to show off. 

-lt