Re: DIY TIVO?

["Ian Lowe" <ian@xxxxxxx>]

>I have 3 x ATI all in wonder 128 pros and their an excellent card, BUT
they
>lack decent sw and mpeg 2 encoding hw to be taken seriously as a
digital
vcr
>IMO. I too have been eyeing up the RADEON as this seems to offer
everything
>on a plate, yet to see one in the flesh though.

Paul

The "MPEG Encoding Hardware" is non existant! My biggest gripe
with AIWs is
that they do not perform as ATI claim. The RADEON AIW uses exactly the same
capture chip (The Rage Theatre Chipset) as the AIW128Pro-32.

This performs identically (According to my benchmarks) as the older
Brooktree based AIW128-16, it just looks nicer (better colour, better white
balance)

I find that with a PIII800EB, and my AIW32 I can encode directly to DivX
using virtualdub. I use the fast motion codec, with the bitrate set at
1200bps, and encode the sound as straight PCM at Cd Quality (no
recompression)

At this level, I find that I can capture an hour of very watchable (VHS
quality, basically) video in about 940Mb. Given that my capture PC has a
27Gb disk, you can do the maths. I don't have a timer feature, but I have
enough diskspace that I can just record the whole day/night then chop out
the bit I want using VirtualDub.

Ian.