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I'll be in Japan for the better part of this year, and I'd like to be able to capture some of the crazy Japanese television onto my Laptop's Hard Drive, then be able to encode that into something reasonably small on the HDD. The second part I can pretty much do myself already, with various free tools (Xvid + Virtualdub would do the trick easily enough), but I'm rather stuck for what to do on the first. Obviously, since it's a laptop, I can't actually get a TV tuner card, though some external solution might be possible. I'm really not sure what's out there though, and it's impossible to get anything from the people at the stores without getting upsold to the $1000 monsters designed for professionals. If there's a $100 solution that can do what I need, I'll take it. I don't need anything more. I'd like the end video to be about 640x480, with about 20-30 frames per second.

So....anyone know any solutions out there for my needs?

A quick Google search brought up this list of products. The lower-end cards probably won't capture above 320x240 efficiently.

Of that list, the Pinnacle PCTV is the best solution, although a little expensive at $170. Still, well worth it.

You could always go for the video input dongle by Dazzle. A labtech buddy of mine, and my professor each own one and they love it. Comes in USB and Firewire flavors. I highly recommend the Firewire version as you'd get more throughput that way. (USB sucks for video capture of any kind.)

Vertigo1 wrote:You could always go for the video input dongle by Dazzle. A labtech buddy of mine, and my professor each own one and they love it. Comes in USB and Firewire flavors. I highly recommend the Firewire version as you'd get more throughput that way. (USB sucks for video capture of any kind.)

The Dazzle (now Pinnacle) DV transcoder will give good quality -- a 25Mbit stream over FireWire is great -- but they generally lack things like built-in tuners and such. It's not the best solution for that sort of TV capture. (In high school, we had a couple of Sony DV transcoders)

phongn wrote:The Dazzle (now Pinnacle) DV transcoder will give good quality -- a 25Mbit stream over FireWire is great -- but they generally lack things like built-in tuners and such. It's not the best solution for that sort of TV capture. (In high school, we had a couple of Sony DV transcoders)

Not true. Unless he's going to actually be flipping channels on the thing, its not going to matter. Its just a video input line which he can capture with whatever program he uses. That being said, that laptop is really going to suck when it comes time to render those video streams after the commercials are removed. Even with my 2GHz AMD with half a gig of 333MHz DDR, it takes about half an hour to render roughly 20 minutes of video at DVD quality.

Vertigo1 wrote:Not true. Unless he's going to actually be flipping channels on the thing, its not going to matter.

I assumed that he might want to flip channels or have it do PVR-like functions on the fly.

Its just a video input line which he can capture with whatever program he uses. That being said, that laptop is really going to suck when it comes time to render those video streams after the commercials are removed. Even with my 2GHz AMD with half a gig of 333MHz DDR, it takes about half an hour to render roughly 20 minutes of video at DVD quality.

That's because most laptop HDs suck Video is usually I/O constrained. And what are you transcoding from? DV? A lot of people try transcoding from HuffYUV if possible (lossless and CPU-unintensive) to MPEG1 (VCD), MPEG2 (SVCD/DVD) or MPEG4.

For the record, the Laptop's (Well, strictly speaking, it's a "Desknote", but anyway..) relevant specs are...

Pentium 4 2.6Ghz
512 KB on-die second level cache
512MB PC-266 DDR SD-RAM
80GB EIDE HDD 5400 RPM
nVidia GForce FX Go5600 128MB AGP
Built-in 56Kbps international fax/modem + 10/100 ethernet & 802.11b Wi-Fi LAN
2 X FireWire & 1 X S-Video ports
4 X USB 2.0 ports

There's also a SiSM650 embedded VGA engine w/ 64MB shared mem on the motherboard, but I'm assuming that's overridden by the GForce anyway.


The Pinnacle is pretty much what I was looking at, though that's about $400 AUD IIRC. I haven't found anything that can match it though, so I probably won't have much of a choice there.

Oh, yes, and I wasn't actually planning on removing the commercials. ^^; I doubt I'll need to be flipping any channels either, nor actually do the functions on the fly. I've got no problem with recording it and leaving it to go overnight with the encoding, just so long as I get that end quality.

Your HD is a bottleneck; if you want to speed things up you could buy an external 7200RPM or 10K HD connected via a FireWire bridge.

phongn wrote:Your HD is a bottleneck; if you want to speed things up you could buy an external 7200RPM or 10K HD connected via a FireWire bridge.

His slow ass RAM isn't helping him any either. 266MHz (PC2100 if memory serves) is rediculously slow by comparison on a P4 system. That thing should've had atleast PC3200 (400MHz) so it could atleast keep up somewhat with the FSB rating of the chip (533MHz or 800MHz, depends on which P4 it is)

phongn wrote:That's because most laptop HDs suck Video is usually I/O constrained. And what are you transcoding from? DV? A lot of people try transcoding from HuffYUV if possible (lossless and CPU-unintensive) to MPEG1 (VCD), MPEG2 (SVCD/DVD) or MPEG4.

I'm recording straight from my DirectTV reciever in DVD quality (720x480 mpeg2 stream with full stereo audio) and I'm basically cutting out 10 minutes of commercials (30min stream down to 20min stream at the same quality). I might be able to boost performance by making a hardware profile and basically making it a bare bones windows load and do it that way...but that might buy me a couple minutes at best. What's holding me back is pulling the streams from my old IBM 45 gigger (75GXP...yeah, i know....but that last LLF fixed the clicking issue for me so I figure why not keep it a while longer?) and saving it to my Maxtor 160GB drive (both are 7200RPM drives, but the 160GB has an 8MB cache vs. 2MB on the IBM drive). The Maxtor has an ATA133 interface (which I've benched it reading at 113MB/sec...unfortunately I haven't taken the time to bench the write speed) and the IBM has an ATA100, although I don't really see that being a problem since the Maxtor can easily keep up with the IBM drive and then some. Whats slowing it down is that I'm not compressing the data any further, which each 30min stream is about....1.3 - 1.4GB each. Without the commercials, they're about 850 - 900MB. Both drives are on the same cable (since my board only has two controllers....I miss my old A7V already....I could've put everything on its own controller!) I just wish the software supported net rendering so I could put the other computer to good use and help lower the rendering times. Ohh well.

Just for the record, the RAM is in dual channel mode. (2x 256MB Corsair sticks)

The last time I did video editing was on P3/733s with 512MB RDRAM and two 10K SCSI drives. Oh, yeah, and a hardware-accelerated DV codec

That Pinnacle box has a real-time MPEG2 encoder, so hardware is less of an issue, and I think the 5400RPM harddrive should be fine for a regular MPEG2 stream.