Matrox Marvel G-400 or ATI All-in-Wonder?!

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Ok. My primary interest is for Capture my old VHS movie Library and anime (japanimation ) on VCD. You know my collection are getting degraded by the time and I'll like to preserve to in digital form.

The choice I got right know, because i don't want to spend $500+ on a expensive Real time MPEG capture hardware is an ATI All-in-Wonder 128 Pro or Matrox Marvel G-400. Both card seems to capture pretty well.

What the best All-in-one card to spend?

-- Francis Batista (batista@tricom.net), January 14, 2000

Answers

OOPs! Sorry for my miswritten paragraph. I getting practice english.

-- Francis Batista (batista@tricom.net), January 14, 2000.

If you are concerned with cost, the cards that you speak of (ATI all in wonder, matrox marvel g400) capture to AVI which takes up HUGE amounts of hard drive space (hard drives to hold up to an hour worth of footage in avi format will exceed 500 dollars alone), and the space and time used to then covert that avi into mpg is not worth it...

I suggest you get a realtime capture solution like Broadway Pro, Darim MPEGator or something like Video Sphinx, Snazzi, Dazzle, Videonics Python.

-- MrVCD (mrvcd@juno.com), January 17, 2000.


ATI All-in-Wonder 128 does have the ability to capture MPEG1/2 streams if you have a powerful enough processor (high P2/P3) but elsewhere I learned that the MPEG1 stream the AIW128 creates is not VCD compliant so you still need to convert it somehow. I heard the quality of the ATI AIW128 32MB is pretty good.

The G-400TV uses MJPEG AVI hardware compression which compresses the video but not the audio - so disk space can get soaked up. Haven't heard any reviews as to quality.

I have heard people recommend the Marvel G400 because the MJPEG compressed AVI is easier to edit than MPEG streams.

Just my .02

-- G (grouchy@newsguy.com), January 17, 2000.


Francis .-

I was on the same situation you are. I bought the Matrox Marvel G400-TV and I am very happy with it.

It is AGP and NTSC. And I use it to capture video with the build in MJPEG hardware support. And this support is also available to output the edited video. 704 x 480 resolution.

With it I can render my 3D aniamtions at that resolution, compress them ( lossing very little quality ) with the MJPEG encoder and put out to tape. Pretty fine to prepare material for VideoCD authoring.

Hope this helps you a little.

-- Roberto Gomez Torres (roberto@tiempo-digital.com), January 21, 2000.


First of all, forget ATI makes graphic...forget they make anything. Second - you only have one option left. I have the Marvel G400, and it's an okay board. It's not great, but works fine (problems I have are probably due to a rather strange version of Windows 98 - all programs, that come with it are under Windows). The capture device does work with several programs - can't really get it to work with Premiere, even though they supply special drivers for it. But the capture program supplied works fine...for capturing (although only 12 or 25 fps...maybe due to pal?) I would recommend this card - it is good for the price you pay ($299) jb

-- jb (penny_o_1@hotmail.com), January 28, 2000.


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