Am Samstag, 13. September 2003 20:46 schrieb Anne Wilson: > I want to build a box whose main purpose would be video capture from > camcorder and vhs, editing, and burning to either vcd or dvd. All > funds available should go into the most essential bits for that > purpose, so I'd like some opinions, please. > > Mobo - I'm torn between Asus A7v8X-X and Soltek SL-KT400-A4C. Specs > are very similar. Both have Via KT400/VT8235 chipsets. > > Asus has 8x agp and Soltek has 4x agp
4x AGP is enough, and ASUS isn't worth the money it costs more (personal opimion, no facts in the latter) > Asus has Realtek 6-chanel codec, which I take to mean on-board sound, > and Soltek has 6-ch AC'97 Audio. I've always avoided on-board audio > in the past, disabling it and putting in a card. Is that still worth > the effort/expense? If this is just a video-transcoding box, you don't need both really. What you need is processing power, a _lot_ of disk space, a lot of ram and a stable setup. > Asus also offers on-board lan. I think these have been troublesome? I have heard that too. If it is a via rhine, noapic should be enough to get it running, but i don't know for sure. > Graphics cards - since I don't do gaming I've not been into the > latest thing in video cards, so I don't know what is significant and > what is hype. I'm looking at 128MB XFX Geforce4 MX44- or FX5200. I > could go higher if there's a real advantage. Any thoughts? For what ? If this box does capturing and transcoding, you could do that headless i think. Even the cheapest card should be enough. Here you get for the money of a GF FX 5200 another 120 Gig of HD. > Any comments about anything I haven't mentioned that is significant > in this scenario? I do a lot of mpeg2 transcoding. But my stuff i convert comes a) from a dv-camcorder or b) from a dvb card. So i can't say a lot about capturing. For transcoding you need a fast CPU, if possible a dual cpu setup helps. The mpeg2encoder all need a lot of memory (means something around or bigger then 512 MB and the need for a lot of disk space is obvious i guess. I don't have a top notch box for transcoding, i plan to use a duron 1300 to do that because its cheap and i can let compute that spare machine all the time. Currently i have a 120 Gig hd for video and i plan to buy a second one in near future. In case you want to make dvd/vcd/svcd you will most likely use mpeg2enc from mjpegtools, just for orientation: On my current 1.1Ghz Duron main machine i get around 7 frames per second, a 1400 Athlon gets around 14 frames per second ( if i remember right), all w/o any filters. Dunno for Intel P4. Steffen
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