How good is ATI realtime mpeg?

[keithm]

I know this is the matrox forum, and I have two marvels's, but creating a DVD from a Marvel capture is a lengthy process: capturing in Picvideo or Mjpeg and then converting it to mpeg2. Lately I have seen ATI all in wonder 128 pro's, ATI all in wonder Radeons (32 meg) and ATI radeon 64 meg vivo's all for under £60. All these cards claim to do realtime mpeg2 capture at 720x576 (pal): has anyone actually tried this? If so what is the quality like?

I'd love to stick with the Marvel's but a the process is slow and B I can't my marvel G200 to work with anything but the original driver disk-so no YUY2 or huffyuv or Picvideo.

[davpen]

I haven't ever more than dabbled with ATI video capture (I did not like the drivers) but I can tell you that they do not have hardware MPEG2 capture (except perhaps the latest 9700 based cards). They instead rely on a software realtime MPEG2 capture. I assume that the capture quality would be about what you would expect from such a setup. You could probably achieve the same thing your Marvel 's and appropriate capture software and codecs.


Cheers,

David.

[keithm]

Interesting. I have had the Marvel do real time mpeg capture using the Ulead MsPro 6.51a power patch but the quality was crap. Searches on vcdlelp.com have users saying the radeon all in wonder does very good real time mpeg2.

[PaulM]

I bought one of the original Radeon All-in-Wonders (7200 I think) a few weeks ago to replace my RRS. On a purely subjective basis and with my so far limited experience of it, I would say that the quality is excellent. I have captured about 3 hours continuously in full 'DVD quality' 720x576 MPEG2 and it looks very good when played back on my monitor. Can't remember what bitrate it uses for that.

The CPU is nowhere near the utilisation that HuffYUV capture gives so I find it difficult to believe there isn't some hardware assistance going on.

I think you'll usually get better quality by capturing lossless and then converting to MPEG but for general purpose use it's more than acceptable.

Cheers,
Paul

[keithm]

Paul, is it an all in wonder or a radeon 64 vivo? You can tell because the vivo doesn't have a tuner or an svhs in?