> quality is going to be better.  Of course, C-Band analog source is
> always the best that can be had, no matter what the so-called experts
"C-Band analog source" - please explain

> Actually I have not found that CPU speed affects video quality at
> all.  Hard drive speed is where you get better quality due to the
> fact that you won't drop frames.  When I had a 4800 RPM drive in my
If you want to compress on the fly with MP43 or DivX (which are the ones I
use to get great video with little disk space) you'd be surprised how much
CPU power it takes. Not on-the-fly, my 800-MHz system encodes 512x384 DivX
 at 12-15fps. Badly-written capture drivers may also require a lot of CPU
power (like FlyVideo's capture driver on Windows 2000... aargh!)

If you use a less computation-expensive [or simply better-optimized :) ]
codec (Wavelets, Morgan MJPEG) you need less CPU power. If you capture
uncompressed only, you don't need a fast CPU, but then you're limited to
capturing 5-15 min. chunks because of 2Gb file size limit, and you're
obligated to have a fast drive.

> I capture 24-bit 320x240 and it only takes about 5 minutes of video
> to hit 2 gigs, IIRC.
If your card allows, capture YUV12 instead. Little loss in terms of
picture quality, but less bits per pixel. VirtualDub allows to "spill"
long capture into several files transparently, so that you don't have to
stop the capture every 5min to enter a new file name...

- Max Timchenko [log in to unmask]

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