Recomended ATI AIW card for me?

[eissug]

A little back story... So far I've captured about 13 family VHS tapes from 1984-1989 using a DVC110 and GV-D1000 (as a firewire bridge, and simultaneously archiving onto miniDV). When I was trying to figure out if the GV did TBC, I found a thread here about loosing a ton of color information in the DV compression. This ruined my satisfaction with what I had already done. Thanks a lot guys! I did these 13 tapes before my father died so that he could watch them on in his hospital bed while dieing, and after he did I stopped. 4 years later I'm trying to finish the job! (And very likely recapture those 13 tapes!)

It is hard for me to believe that these stone age ATI cards are the best but with all I've read here I must! I'm pretty sure I still have my AIW 128/128Pro at my Mom's house, but I could have sold it on eBay 15 years ago and forgot.

It was a knee jerk reaction of mine to not consider lossless uncompressed video as a possibility when starting this process. I thought I was doing a "good" job with my DV codec. My video editing/capture experience until transferring these family videos was based on my old G3 with a huge 5GB hard drive, and later on the ATI AIW128 with a very expensive 160GB hard drive. Uncompressed video wasn't a thing that I could consider! Since they are MY family videos I want the best results possible. I'm also planning on making new videos with a vidicon tube camera for a youtube vlog and want the quality for that as well. I ran the numbers through a bitrate calculator, and was surprised to consider that 240GB/hr isn't that much.

While money is important to me, I don't want to save money on this process where a little extra here and there will make a big difference.

Lordsmurf wrote here:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...html#post20761

...and I checked the ATI AIW card model list:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...html#post13441

That he preferred the 7200 and 7500. Does anyone think the 8500, which also uses the same chipset, should be equal to his preference?

In that second link it is mentioned that the 200 chipset refined the quality of the video, but in other posts the 9000 series wasn't recommended because of the possible addition of noise. Should I start buying 9000 cards until I get one that doesn't have noise???

If lordsmurf reads this, I'd love to get some clarification on the 200 chipset being better vs a preference for the 7200/7500 (and maybe also 8500?

Is there any chance I can use Windows 7? I found a few places where people had mixed experiences... I have a PCIe flash drive I'd like to use, as well as >1GbE.

http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...er-9600xt.html


I'm sorry if these questions have been covered. I really have tried to figure out which card was the perfect one for me.

[ehbowen]

First question: Do you have, or can you reasonably acquire, a Windows XP computer with AGP slot motherboard? If the answer is no, then the 7500/8500/9000 series question is moot. If yes, you'll need the input of someone with extensive AIW experience to determine the "best" card for your application. I'll just say that I picked up an AIW 8500 DV kit, complete, at a reasonable price and got it working in a Dell AGP tower. I kept the original HDD as the C:\ drive but I added a PCI SATA card and an internal 2GB HDD as well as a hot-swap bay for sneakernetting captures to my editing computer. The rig works well.

If you don't have and are not sure you can get a good AGP motherboard PC but you can obtain a PCIe computer with Windows XP and a modern power supply with the 6-pin video card power connector, then see this post I made a couple of years back for my recipe to build a capture system around an AIW X1800 card. The eBay links are now obsolete, I'm sure, but some Google-fu ought to find a suitable substitute. This is my other go-to capture system, and at least when capturing lossless to VirtualDub its performance is virtually indistinguishable from the AIW 8500DV.

Either setup should do you well, but be advised that you will need to use Windows XP. That thread you referenced ends with Lordsmurf essentially giving up on Win7...and if he can't make it work, I know for certain that I can't!

Editing To Add: While you're looking at your various video card options, don't overlook the necessity for a good sound card! You want to offload as much from the CPU as possible while capturing lossless, so don't make it shoulder the burden of internal audio. Lordsmurf recommends the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz if you can find a good used one, but I've had acceptable results with an ASUS Xonar DG (PCI) and DGX (PCIe)...which at last check (a while back) were both still available new.

[eissug]

Thank you.

Yes, I can put together a Windows XP machine. I tried to get a flash PCIe card working under Windows XP 32bit tonight, but it appears the drivers for 32bit Windows were scrubbed from the internet a decade ago.

I think it was lordsmurf who said in response to someone else that trying to use 64bit Windows XP was asking for trouble. Can I assume it should work, but with issues? If I can have my flash PCIe card and do lossless capture, I would be very happy.

[lordsmurf]

No x64 drivers exist, it does not work at all with x64 XP/Vista/7/8/10.
It was hackish for Vista/7 x86.

[eissug]

Well, I suppose the advice to build a decent system supporting AGP cards was good advie. I can't find any PCIe cards for sale with the adapters, and I don't like the idea of building something that is hard to maintain. I was really hoping to use an ioDrive or ioMemory since they are getting dirt cheap, but no luck. They won't work on 32bit Windows without the drivers that don't exist any more... 2700MB/s reads are nice!

[eissug]

I'm sorry...I KNOW a period correct AGP setup is the most practical thing to build, but for an uncompressed workflow I'd like something faster...much faster!

I just bought a PCIe AIW 2006 card for $18, including priority mail shipping. It did not include any cables, but the point of purchasing it is to do a "test".

For the test I will setup a modern-ish 7 year old motherboard with a 25-100 gigabit ethernet adapter and 3.2TB PCIe flash drive. I'll install either Ubuntu or Unraid on it, create a KVM, and try to get Windows XP running as a guest with the AIW PCIe card forwarded to the guest. If that works, I will be able to capture uncompressed video onto the SSD and then transfer at speeds approaching 2GB/s to a file server for editing. I haven't actually assembled this file server yet. It is unknown if I will use Windows Server or Linux. If I use Linux, and the KVM works, the Windows XP guest and AIW card might as well just go into the fileserver.

And, because I KNOW this is probably impractical I have a lunchbox computer with an AGP slot that I will be upgrading with a 2TB SSD. It currently has 40GB hard drive that I used to use for DV video capture a decade ago.

It is at least worth a shot to find out if it is possible to build the hottest AIW capture workstation. The $18 will be well spent on entertainment. (and I actually haven't had the opportunity to setup a KVM, only read about them)

For the boring and practical AGP setup, I've purchased a AIW 128 Pro with adapters/cables for $30 shipped, which was a good deal on cables...and a 7200 without cables for $15 shipped. Hopefully one of these things will allow me to capture video. Best case ethernet throughput is probably around 3-4Gb on a 10GbE card...

[ehbowen]

Without cables (and the CORRECT cables!) you're likely to find that your test never even gets started. Don't assume that the cables from one card will fit another AIW card...they changed like dreams.

Again, I KNOW that a valid second source for a working VIVO (Video-In-Video-Out) cable for an AIW X1800 is svideo.com. Other than that...good luck.

Edit To Add: The critical thing when capturing lossless (NOT uncompressed!) is throughput. You NEED a SATA card and drive, preferably ESATA/External or a hot-swap bay. Don't plan on using a USB drive, even on a fast computer, without a great deal of disappointment. As long as you're using the machine for capture only and using HuffyUV as your compression algorithm (lossless and more CPU-efficient than the alternatives), even a 20-year old CPU and AGP mainboard has the horsepower to keep up. Once you have the capture in the can, pull the drive from the hot-swap bay and sneakernet it to a modern Windows 7 or 10 machine for editing and rendering.

[eissug]

Thank you for the feedback. The scope of my test would be to confirm that the hardware (the PCIe card itself) pass-thru actually works (there have been problems with modern AMD cards for example), possibly with a coax input. Honestly, by the time I finished writing what I was planning I was already feeling a little tired.

Is this what you were referring to with svideo.com?
https://www.svideo.com/radeon.html

I think the X1800 would require a strange square connector with one thumbscrew?

For the storage, I was planning on using a decent 2TB or 2x1TB SSDs connected to the internal SATA of the computer. If I were able to make the KVM work, then they could write to the PCIe flash at over 1000mb/s sequential. Earlier this week I benchmarked one power limited (the drive wants up to 75w during writes and it was limited to 25w by the motherboard) and the PCI slot only provided 2 lanes instead of 4, so the cards bandwidth was reduced from 4000mbyte/s to 2000...I was able to copy a 10GB file from the drive to itself at 650-700MB/s. I am easily entertained.