Afternoon all,

I am intrested in getting started in making my own Video CDs. And such I have been looking about at what hardware I need to get get. So what I would like to know is first what capture card to get, either AVI or MPEG is fine since I am not home for long stretches of time, and secondly, does the CDR/CDRW need to support the white book format? Or if it can write to a CDR/CDRW thats all it takes? Some of the specs of the CD writers that I've looked at mention the white book format while others dont. And finally, should I get a scsi hard drive or is ata-33 enough?

Thanks Tim Rooney

-- Tim Rooney (TRooney@Narex.com), September 14, 1999

Answers

Any CD-Writer will works as long as EZ-CD Creator Deluxe (or other VCD writting program) will support the writter, so I you can create a audio cd, then a vcd should write fine. You might want to try the new version of EZ-CD Creator (EZ-CD v.4 Deluxe)which you can buy for $75. The quality of the vcd is based on how much you want to pay. You can start as low as a Dazzle or as nice as a Broadway. On your hard drive, You should leave at least 2GB free (if you are using a MPEG card) and more space if you are using a AVI capture card. Make sure you check the "Getting Started" section on this site and also the "Better Quality" section. Good luck with making your VCDs!

-- Jay (jlinkhome@yahoo.com), September 14, 1999.

Definitely go with a MPEG capture card, vs. AVI. You will get a much sharper picture with MPEG, mainly because you are directly creating the format used by VCD. With AVI you have to convert it, and you will experience some additional video degradation over MPEG encoding directly (in my experience--I've experimented with both ways). And with an MPEG capture care you won't have to worry about disk speed (I have a pair of E-IDE 16 myelf), or need as much disk space as with AVI.

As far as encoding hardware, remember "You get what you pay for." A Dazzle card will work, but if you're picky about the quality, then I don't recommend it (I had one before). Currently I use a MPEGator board(MPEG-1) with the M-Filter pre-filtering board (conditions the video for encoding). It's not cheap, but I like good quality video.

Hope that was helpful.

-- Patrick Kelley (pjkelly@cvikota.com), September 15, 1999.

I disagree completely. Broadway Pro capturing to AVI, and then compressing to MPEG is much cleaner than capturing directly to MPEG. Hands down..

Kevin

-- Kevin (delgadil@cisco.com), September 16, 1999.

That depends on your MPEG encoding hardware. As I mentioned, I have experimented with both methods, and definitely got far better results with direct MPEG encoding.

-- Patrick Kelley (pjkelly@cvikota.com), September 17, 1999.

I think Patrick Kelley is right because direct mpg makes good quality every time you compress quality will be downgraded did any one of you heard about VideoOne Recoder(RT mpeg1 encoder board)

-- Bilal Ahmad (bilal7_99@yahoo.com), May 29, 2000.