Windows XP analog capture rig component specifics?
 

I’ve been researching dedicated Windows XP builds for capturing uncompressed analog video.

I was trying to find a board that supports AGP, 4GB of RAM, and Core2 or even QuadCore. I haven’t been able to find any motherboard that exists with all these.


I have a handful of basic questions.

1.) In general is the main purpose of these dedicated rigs purely capturing the audio and video in the highest quality? Is there other video software / utilities etc exclusive to Windows XP that make this option more optimal, or do most people just capture with the XP system and then transfer the files to a modern rig for use with avisynth, VirtualDub, and other modern tools?


2.) I see that the ultimate best ATI AIW cards recommended are the AGP 9000 series. Is 2GB RAM the max for AGP motherboards, or are there models that allow for 4GB? Does this potential RAM capacity issue make much of a difference for a build that is only capturing with system overhead kept to an absolute minimum besides that?

3.) Similar to question 2, is there a big difference between a single core P4, 2 core or quad core for capture use?

4.) Are the best AGP ATI All-in-Wonder cards more or less expensive than the best PCI ATI All-in-Wonder cards?


Lastly, given all of the above factors, how would a 4GB, Quad Core, PCI solution with one of the best ATI AIW PCI cards compare to a 2GB, P4, AGP ATI build?


Any thoughts would be appreciated. I’m just trying to narrow down why certain choices are made in regards to analog video and the various component choices.

I feel like there are a handful of threads recently on this topic where people are over-complicating things.

The machine I'm currently using as a dedicated WinXP capture box is:

• AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (single core circa 2003)
• 1GB RAM
• 1.5TB WD Green, partitioned between OS & Files
• WinXP SP2 stripped down to essentials

Would I recommend this setup? No. Especially the shared system drive. But it works perfectly fine if I don't exceed the Fastest setting of Huffyuv. Better specs reduce chances of frame drops and allow higher compression, but remember that a lot of us did lossless captures in the early 2000s using slower hardware than what I just listed.

Over the past two nights, I literally did simultaneous captures of a few 30-minute tapes on this "slow" system. Two outputs from one VCR to two capture devices in same system; two instances of VirtualDub, captured to one HDD. After setting the 2nd device to No Display instead of Overlay/Preview, I didn't even see it hit 50% CPU load when using Huffyuv Fastest. There was 1 Inserted Frame total.

Thanks for the input on your capturing setup and experience. It's definitely nice that you've had success on a 1GB single core setup.

I'm not trying to over-complicate things, but I don't really have much bearing as far system requirements and potential shortcomings. I'm going to be piecing together a legacy system which is going to be a significant effort and cost no matter how I go about it, so I'd like to at least get max performance out of what I do end up purchasing.

And believe me, I have read hours worth of threads I could find on this site and others, and the questions in the OP are what remains.

The recommended ATI AIW cards only had driver support up to Windows XP. This is the primary reason for having to stay with XP for capture rigs. Although, if you were to use the often recommended Turtle Beach Santa Cruz audio capture card, I would guess it may also be so old that it only had support up to Windows XP as well. I've never had one, so I cannot say for sure. It is simply because some of the best gear for analog video capture was made long ago and hasn't been supported since XP. There could be other things tied to XP, not sure. Things like older versions of Sound Forge Pro mentioned on this forum for audio restoration or Avidemux were from the XP era. Although those may be installable on 64-bit Windows OS. Don't have anything after XP to find that out.

If you are capturing lossless and plan to do video restoration, some Avisynth plugins or Virtualdub filters can be quite CPU intensive. So if your post-processing a video with something like QTGMC (just as an example) with an older XP machine that can only process 2 or 3 frames per second, then getting a much more modern machine where you can get a much higher rate will save you a lot of time getting through your videos. You can use Avisynth and Virtualdub on XP, or a more modern Windows system. If it's got USB, then you can transfer files off the capture machine to your main rig via USB hard drive. Or if you have a separate SATA drive for data on the capture rig (which is preferred), I suppose you could swap it back and forth between rigs also. Of course, XP cannot fully use a hard drive beyond 2 or 3 TB due to addressing limitations.

The only capture machine I have is an Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 @ 3GHz with 2GB DDR2 RAM. It does lossless HuffYUV capture effortlessly. It gets by with very little CPU usage. Virtualdub doesn't consume that much RAM during capture. The video card and the I/O to your capture hard drive (separate hard drive recommended) is where most of the demand is during capture. Since it's an XP machine, it's already off the internet and should not be doing anything else anyway. So, I think you could get by with less if you had to. The fact that AGP cards are recommended indicates that the rest of the hardware doesn't need to do be anything newer than what was used 20 years ago when computers had much less CPU and RAM. I think many have said they get by with a 5400 RPM drive. As said before, if you're going to do a lot of video work, you'll greatly benefit from another machine with the advantage of much more processing power, memory, and I/O speed. So no need to put more than necessary into the XP machine. I personally deviate a bit for my post-processing machines, because I don't have a Windows load beyond XP. So I either do XP in a virtual machine on Linux or dual boot a more powerful machine with XP installed. But there's no getting around using native Windows XP for the ATI AIW video capture work.

The forum typically recommends an AGP or a regular PCI ATI AIW card. Although this forum also mentions some PCI Express cards, which is the route I have chosen due to the existing components I already had. I've been able to make that work for XP. It is said that you are limited to lossless capture when going with PCI Express, which is fine with me. I think the driver support got worse as they got into the PCI express cards, but it at least does lossless. The main thing is to have the magic ATI chipset that the AGP and regular PCI cards also use. Not sure there's much difference in price ranges between AGP or PCI or PCI express. I got an x600 Pro PCI Express card for not much at all. PCI Express cards have a bigger concern with having to get an additional cable that are harder to find, which bridges between the card and the standard Purple capture cable that AGP and regular PCI cards also use. I managed to find one without much cost. This post shows the two versions and what cards are suspected to go with each version: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...html#post60378 The thread also has the AIW x600 Pro driver install disc, if you went that route. Otherwise, I think the main AIW sticky thread only has a smaller set of files to install for all PCI Express cards, which may not be as ideal as getting the original driver disc for a given model.

So I cannot give you any detailed "shootout" type of comparison of performance between various CPUs, card slot types, or RAM totals. I'm just saying try to get by with less cost for capture with a single purpose capture machine, and put most of your money into a more modern rig for the CPU intensive work that is video restoration. It's not a question of better performance between different specs. It just has to be able to do one job without causing frames being dropped or video/audio sync being lost. These kinds of issues have been reported in other threads, but don't seem to have been due to insufficient CPU, RAM, or hard drive speed. They have typically been due to capturing to the same hard drive as the main windows hard drive or having something like antivirus or some other process still running and consuming too much CPU while trying to capture.

Here is what I use for my XP AGP capture rigs:

Intel D875PBX Motherboards
4gb Ram - XP only recognizes 3.2gb --> Quality ram only
P4 3.0ghz CPU's
SSD's for OS/Files --> not reccomended by many... not sure why
2tb Seagate for captures
WIN XP SP2 stripped to the bone
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Soundcards
AIW 9000, 9200, 9600

CPU load is very low (10% to 20%) on Preview / Overlay. Using an SSD/SATA drive for OS can be a pain to setup. I was never a fan of any AMD cpu's (although I love their stock prices!!) but maybe softening to building a couple of XP AGP rigs for comparison. I love Intel MB's because of their ease of use and compatability. I laways seem to have trouble with VIA chipsets.

I also have an AIW x600 PCIe system. That system I use an Core DUO E8400 CPU. Pretty much the same parts as above for the rest of the system.

Bottom line, performance is realtively the same across all my systems. The SSD are far snappier with programs but capture performace is the same.

BTW, just for clarification, "support" is 100% correct.

However, ATI AIW AGP (non PCIe) could be force installed in Vista x86 and 7 x86. Results were buggy, and ATI MMC would fail after reboot. But lossless capturing, with ATI AIW AGP, on Vista/7 x86 systems was possible. Proof of concept. x64 would not install whatsoever, nor would the AIW PCIe cards. PCI untested, but likely same as AGP.

I accomplish this about 10 years ago, and then jwillis repeated my successes (and failures) a few years ago. He made mention of possibly being able to write drivers, maybe for x64, after looking at all the code ... but then he moved on to the more-important DVD recorder research that has yielded us new features in ISOBuster (working with the dev of that software). Maybe he can circle back around to AIW someday, or maybe another IT/driver-savvy person wants to tackle the challenge?

I'll reply to this thread more later. :)

Thank You so much for this detailed response. You understood my original questions, and pretty much addressed them all!

I don't really need detailed shootouts as long as I know that I'll only really need to use the XP machine for just the capture and nothing else (already have a modern windows machine that I can do the editing on). I figured this was the case, but I just wanted to be sure.


Thank you for posting your exact build and CPU load levels. This is a big help and now I know the target zone when looking for parts on my own build. Really appreciate that.