[thechat] Capture Card (Was: Ohio State)

[Jackson Yee]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Evans" <chris at unhappyfun.com>
> On a related note, I want to rip the game (4.5 hours) off my Tivo.  I
> can send to VCR, so I figure I can get a decent capture card & hard
> drive and burn it on to VCD. Any suggestions on how to do this on $250
> or less?

You can easily get a decent capture card for $250 or less - just do a search
on Google or Pricewatch.com for details.  I have a very cheap Phoebe TV Master
at ~$50 myself, but if you eventually want to use this card for home theater
or tv output, you'll want a card that can capture at 640x480 @ 15fps and
accept s-video.  I've heard great things about the Winnov cards, but it's been
a couple of years since I've had my card, I'm sure that the market's changed
drastically in that time.

The problem is fitting 4.5 hours of a sports game onto a 700MB CD.  Even using
MPEG4, you'll be sacrificing a lot of detail because of all of the movements
in the crowds, which tends to increase the size of the video stream
drastically.  You might be better off splicing the video onto two or more CDs,
or even better, a DVD-R.  I have a couple of old Michael Jordan games which
I've converted to MPEG4, and am keeping on the hard drive until DVD-R's drop
in price.  Even at 320x240 @ 15fps, the two hour games still take up more than
1.3GBs.

Let me know when you get the card - I can give you much more details on video
compression and settings then.

Regards,
Jackson Yee
jyee at vt.edu