Hi lordsmurf, will this 9600 be ok for PAL and is this a true 9600 as I have seen others with a fan assembley where the heatsink is....the url is here: http://store.computerccw.com/ccw/pro...oducts_id/1505

Also please can you elaborate on your lossless comment as I don't follow. I assume that lossless means it captures all hardware work flow output, worts and all. Is this not the case and if not why not?

Thanks once again

Post a sample of one of your captures. Anyone would be glad to analyze. What do your lossy captures look like after they're filtered and edited? We can't guess about all of the world's captures, LOL!

Tonight I'm posting an encoded version of some lossless YUY2 captures from my dark past. One is example of how a crummy noisy tape over a poor cable line looks, and how it looks after I worked a bit on it. The second before-and-after samples are from a lossless capture that presents some interesting lessons.

A) Attached: Liv5A_cut_EP_original_cap.mp4is from a 6-hour VHS tape recorded Dec 1992 using a noisy, under-powered analog cable signal fed thru a cheap RF amplifier, multiple cheap RF splitters, sent thru the world's cheapest home cables to a cheap mono 2-head 1989 RCA VCR on cheap no-name tape. As if that weren't dumb enough, I recorded at slow, low-detail 6-hour speed on used tape. The sample is hard telecined. Captured with a Panasonic PV-S4670 SVHS VCR (no dnr) an ES10 tbc pass-thru, and either an AIW 7500 AGP or 9600XT, I forget which. My old AG-1980 wouldn't track this tape without serious top or side tinted border noise in various parts of the tape. The original is telecined.

In the unfiltered original look for 2 frames near the clip's end (frame 1456-1457, 48.6 seconds) with a huge dark gray ball at screen center.

B) Liv5A_ivtc_cut_EP_playback sample.mp4. The modified version of the above was previously posted in the forum, and is located here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...back-samplemp4. I'm not perfectly satisfied (of course not, and there are remnants of cyan and magenta rainbows in the blue sky). The unique look of 1954 Technicolor film isn't easy to get from bad tape.

The two posts below are an old lesson in what to fix, what not to fix, what needs fixing, what doesn't, and what the wrong choice of filter looks like. One would think a commercial VHS would be cleaner than home made. Maybe yes, maybe no. This retail tape was Memphis Belle, butchered from the original 1.66:1 movie to 4:3 on VHS (criminal. I tell you). The sample is 2.2 minutes of short cuts from the worst part of the tape, the first half. The original tape is telecined.

C) Try the filtered version first, 2.2 minutes of short cut shots from the VHS, attached as MB_Edits_Rework.mp4. You'll see some examples of over filtering, inappropriate filter choice with oddball effects, and some shots that look OK. Each scene had some defect or other: spots, halo's, excessive grain, bad color, etc.

D) is from the original, unfiltered huffyuv/YUY2 captures, attached as MB_edits_Original.mp4. Same scenes in the same order as the reworked versions. As you look at these original shots, as I did some years later, you note that some of the scenes don't appear to have problems (in fact, some of them could be left as-is except for a b it of color touch-up). Some fixes look better than the original, some look, eh, not so great. It took forever to relocate these shots, capped originally on an AG-1980, then a Panasonic PV-S4670. I forget which cap belongs to which player. I also forget which cap was made with the 7500 AGP and which with the 9600XT. Learn to keep notes in text files with your archives, not on paper.

Obviously the forum would prefer unencoded lossless samples for specific problems, but these are general demos. In unencoded format, The huffyuv lossless version sample file and the Lagarith reworked/filtered sample file from Memphis Belle are ~700 MB for each file.

Lessons learned:
- To much filtering is too much, and it's noticeable.
- The wrong filter choice for a problem can look really weird.
- You can't clean 100% of all noise in VHS. Live with this fact happily, or at least grudgingly, lest ye lose thy mind.
- If you think you have your levels and colors perfect in a fixup, let it rest for a werk and come back. 50% of the time you'll change your mind.
- Be really careful with sharpeners and degrainers. See how long you can pretend that they don't exist.

See attached.

Update: Ooops. Forgot to add: my AVT-8710 was in circuit on all the above captures.

The 9600 has no cooling fan. It has block of heat dissipation cooling fins. The fan came with the 9600 XT and 9600 Pro AIW's. Only the TV tuner sections were specific for NTSC or PAL. You won't use the TV tuner for VHS capture input.

AIW 9600 Pro: http://www.cnet.com/products/ati-all...00-pro-128-mb/
AIW 9600 XT: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...p?EdpNo=988543

9600XT:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1466170719

The main difference is extra features, designed I think for higher-speed gaming. All three are pretty much the same concerning capture. The TV tuner used the card's RF input and was analog only.

I think LS means that lossles capture gets everything as-is, in the context we're using here with the AIW's and capture software such as VirtualDub.

The problem is that your question is wrong.

"warts and all" implies that you can capture a version without warts/etc. And that's not the case. Image quality has nothing to do with capture.

Lossless just prevents digital artifacts and further quality loss.

The VCR/TBC/etc, not capture card or codec, is what helps make quality wart-less.

Make sense now?

Thanks, LS. But uh-oh, I can see the next question coming, LOL!. If the capture card doesn't matter, why are some recommended and some not? Many people capture to lossless with an EZCap, EZGrabber, and Virtualdub. I tried it. No cigar. Grimy looking image. Sent it back. Some cards clip blacks, some have undefeatable AGC, some are noisy, some seem to lack clarity IMO.

Having tried a few and seen results from many others, I'm sticking with AIW.

[EDIT] Got a PM query wanting to know why some of the "original" Belle scenes look dim. Well, they were dim on the tape. Then all of a sudden a blazing high-contrast shot would stream by, then go dim and off-color again. Typical VHS behavior. I decided to leave Levels inside the histogram's safe area with a single worst-case setting for the entire run, then fix specific scenes later. Changing level settings every 5 minutes would take forever.

Yep, again, wrong question.

Read it again: "Image quality has nothing to do with capture."

But image quality is only one aspect of a quality capture. You need a card that faithfully ingests the signal (and thus the image). Those cheap EZcap/etc cards, or DV boxes, introduce artifacts. That's why the capture card matters.

Thanks for posting it here. Tech questions should be answered in threads, so we can all learn and discuss. :)

Thanks. That should clear up any confusion.

Actually that was the question, and the entire PM. I directed the sender to look for the quote and for my answer in this thread.

Sometime people never follow up in a post.

:)

Wow thanks for the examples @Sanlyn - very interesting to compare and contrast (no pun intended:)). I noticed on both "original" lossless clips, there are horizontal lines where there are fast moving images such as the airplane blades at 9 or 10 seconds on MB edits original. Why does this happen as I am sure some of my canopus captures also have this...but I noticed that they cleaned up on both your edited files. Also in vhs it is typical to have a noise bar at the bottom of the image - what is this and how can it be cleaned up as I noticed you have also overcome this in your edits. What do I need to do to clean it right up ?

@ lordsmurf - thanks for clarifying the "worts and all" comment. Actually I had a different interpretion in my mind and by this I mean that whatever amount of prefiltering at VCR / TBC etc prior to ingest, at ingest stage itself the remaining raw analogue output is captured but after some level of prefiltering upstream...does this make more sense?

Also could someone kindly confirm if the card link I posted in my earlier post is ok to use as a 9600? I have noticed that there are 2 variants of the 9600 - one with a fan assembley and one with a heatsink respectively so not sure if the 9600 I am looking at is genuine or not...

Thank you once again

I think you refer to horizontal combing from interlaced and telecined frames. Part of it is due to hard-coded telecine on tape, and with interlaced video it has to do with tape noise (which looks worse after lossy encoding) which often results in "edge buzz". The modified clips use denoisers, edge cleaners and inverse telecine. The modified clips don't have telecine reinstated. That would be done during an encode for a frame rate raised from 23.976 to 29.97, but with soft-coded telecine rather than the sloppier method of hard-coded (physically "interlaced") frames. Soft-coded telecine applies playback flags directing a player to repeat certain fields during play to maintain correct frame rates, rather than using the hard-coded method of encoding those frames as physically interlaced.

And some of the horizontal noise is just noisy VHS, period.

On most media players, interlacing and telecine should not be so obvious. If VLC is your primary PC media player, remember that VLC Player doesn't deinterlace by default. In VLC it has to be enabled in the player's Preferences menus. If Windows Media Player is your main player, WMP doesn't handle interlace or telecine very well. Most NLE preview windows don't deinterlace or remove telecine.

The post-processed shots go back a very long time. I made a lot of newbie mistakes: inappropriate filter for specific tasks, filters set to aggressively, etc. I acquired a little more patience since, so that the 1954 Jerry Lewis scene looks more sane.

AS for some of the real errors that required work, you might have missed the yellow-orange angular "flash" that occurs in the very first original shot, from upper left to lower right at 2.836 sec and 2.870 sec (frames 85 & 86). There are visible edge halos and multiple dct ringing on contrasty vertical edges in frame 2595 (1min, 26.587sec), in objects against the bright cockpit windows in the scene starting at frame 3001 (1min, 40.133sec), and similar halos and edge ghosts here and there through the video -- which is odd, because they're not seen in most other shots in the tape. There's also motion flutter (horizontal noise), some of the infamous VHS "floating sludge" in dark areas, and other problems.

In the shorter 1954 movie clip at the railroad station, the image has more than just edge buzzing on motion. It has line shimmer and luma flicker, which you can best see in the dark background and white lines on the clipboard. Other problems, too, including visible color bleed and chroma shift 6 pixels to the right, lots of magenta and cyan chroma noise (mostly rainbows in the blue sky), incorrect white balance (too cyan), incorrect black balance (too green), and a few more obvious difficulties. A lot of this was corrected in the fix-up version, but some defects remain -- I decided that fixing everything would be too destructive.

All cleanup and color work was done in Avisynth and VirtualDub, except one scene in the 1954 movie was color graded in AfterEffects and the settings transposed manually into similar image filters in VirtualoDub. I made some mistakes, but I managed (I hope) to maintain much of the original look of film sources without making the results look like etched "digitized" copies.

Yes. It's video head-switching noise. The pixel height varies with different tapes and players. It's seen when playing your VCR directly into a TV as well, but it's masked in the overscan area. HDTV's normally have overscan applied, unless you disable it in your TV setup menus.

I fix those borders in Avisynth. In the shorter 1954 movie clip there's unused side border noise (nowadays it would contain black pixels) and head-switching noise. In the Belle clip the borders are different. I cleaned up the borders in Avisynth in the original YUV colorspace using the Crop() command to remove unwanted pixels, and the AddBorders() command to add black border pixels to restore the frame's original dimensions in a way that centered the image in the frame. The core image content itself isn't modified using this method. Many chop off borders and resize the image. What a shame. They have no idea that unnecessary resizing is a destructive operation and that it alters the images' final display ratio.

I have to let Lordsmurf address the details -- he explains the innards better than I. What kind of "additional prefiltering?" The filters I used were applied in post-processing, not during capture. The only VDub hookup into the capture driver's filters was Levels adjustment.

Not two variants, but three. See notes, links, and image at the bottom part of post #42, above. All three AIW's use the same capture chip and drivers.

I have just bought this minus the cables/adapters...any good?

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/131847543301

The 9600 AIW series are full-scale graphics monitor display and capture cards in one. You need two cables for capture as well as monitor display. Plugged into an AGP slot, it replaces any inboard integrated graphics adapter you might have in your system. Its cables included a connecting wire and plastic dongle for input jacks, which connected to the black DIN input socket on the back of the card. The other cable is an output assembly that connects to the large white center connector on the back of the card, and has VGA output cables for your monitor (you can connect two monitors, for what it's worth) and also analog outputs for a recorder or TV.

I saw some 9600 series selling on eBay-uk with the output cable, one with output cable and original installation CD. I've purchased a ton of a/v gear from the uk and paid very little for shipping to the U.S. It might be possible to find the famous ATI purple dongle for the inputs.

The Sapphire series were a rebranded line of AIW's.

Not true! :old:

... sort of.

The output bundle contains the loopback audio cable. So whether or not it is needed depends on the audio capture method.
- If internal AUX connection, then it's not needed.
- If external loopback, it's needed.

True, if you connect the audio card internally to the AIW, you don't need the 1/8" audio output loop. Thanks for catching that one, I had to drag out my capture PC to refresh ye olde memory. You still need the center cable for monitor display. The two cables are often found separately. What you won't need in the package shown below are the ATI remote and batteries and USB receiver for it. The full package also came with a second CD containing a free but horrible 3rd-party editor that most people threw away. The cables look like this:

9600/9600XT/9600 Pro common AIW AGP accessories:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1466351722

Output (left), input (right):
http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1466351772

Thanks - judging from both your comments I assume the card is good ? Next I need to find the purple adaptor and the output cables...where can I get the software from ? What software is compatible with this card? I assume it is on this lovely site somewhere?

The 9600 is the same capture technology and methods as the 9600XT and 9600 Pro.

Like almost all graphics and capture cards, you need the maker's drivers and software. In this case, you need ATI's software. The entire MMC 8.8 Catalyst install package from an ATI CD for AIW 9000-9600 cards is over 400MB. The contents of the CD are posted as multipart RAR archives in digfitalfaq at http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...html#post14940. Also some comments on that page.

If your XP machine doesn't have Directx 90c or later, you need that as well (XP's default is Directx8). Posted as multipart RAR here http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide....html#post9468. Get only the 5 DirectX files, not the other software listed.

If you don't have MS .Net Framework 2.0 or later installed in your XP system, you need it. Install only the 2-bit (x86) verion for XP. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/down...s.aspx?id=1639. If you have a later version of .Net Framework, you don't need 2.0. Check Control Panel for the version installed on your XP.

There's a free 32-bit WinRAR decompressor download here: http://www.rarlab.com/rar/wrar531.exe.

Check back here before you install any ATI software or hardware. For some reason I don't see ATI Catalyst software instructions posted anywhere. Install procedure will be slightly different depending on the current graphics card in your XP machine.

Thanks for your advice Sanlyn. I am waiting for the card to arrive and will also need to find the relevant connectors - still it is a positive step forwards :)

Just one question in the meantime - how do you tell if a capture card is lossless or lossy ? Is it in the file extension, hardware or something else?

You're the one who makes it lossless when it's created. It's not the file extension. The container you'll be using for lossless capture is AVI, which can accept different codecs. VirtualDub capture writes to an AVI container. In the capture setup in VirtualDub you'd set the "Custom Format..." dialog to 720x576 for PAL source (or 720x480 for NTSC source), and the colorspace to YUY2. Set "Compression" to huffyuv, which is a lossless codec.

...and if the file in question isn't one you created yourself -- or if you simply forgot:

MediaInfoXP is a simple GUI that displays video properties in text list format. The program is 100% self-contained, no DLL dependencies. No installation and no adware.

Create a folder called "MediaInfoXP" for the .zip download, and download the .zip file here: MediaInfo-GUI.2016-05-21.zip. Load the .zip file into that MediaInfoXP folder. After unzipping, you'll see several files. Double-click on MediaInfoXP.exe to run it. The dialog window will have no data. The window's top menu bar has only 2 menu items. Click on the "Application..." menu item, then click on "Preferences...", then select "Enable the Shell Integration". Close the menu, then close the MediaInfoXP program.

Because the app's Windows Shell Integrations are now enabled, when you right-click on a video file you'll see a context popup menu of options. Near the top of the Windows popup menu click on "Analyze file with MediaInfoXP". MediaInfoXP will open, and in 10 seconds or so the video's properties will appear in the window. The window can be resized. You can select the contents with a mouse and copy the text contents to the Windows clipboard. Or you can right-click anywhere in the app's window and get a menu of output options, such as saving as a .txt file or copying the contents to the clipboard.

Below is a MediaInfoXP text report for a chunk from the Belle lossless capture that I edited a couple of days ago. The entries in bold blue show that the video is in an AVI container. The video inside the container is encoded with HFYU (Huffyuv v.2, actually 2.2.1), a lossless codec. The frame size is 720x480 (NTSC), frame rate 29.97 fps. The video is captured as interlaced (actually it's telecined, but many players will often treat hard-telecined video as plain interlace). The colorspace is a 4:2:2 YUV system, which would indicate YUY2 or similar. The audio is uncompressed PCM at 48KHz, 16-bit sampling (suitable for DVD or BluRay audio compression).

You'll notice that the "aspect ratio" entry states an AR of 3:2. Indeed., the physical frame size 720x480 is a 3:2 aspect ratio. This is because lossless AVI has no "display" aspect ratio flags the way lossy encoded video does, such as DVD or BluRay, etc. A PAL lossles huffyuv AVI at 720x576 would show an aspect ratio of 5:4 (or 1.25:1), even if the original tape played on TV at 4:3.

A lossy anamorphic encode (PAL DV, DVD, BluRay, mp4, etc.) would show the encoded video's intended display aspect ratio flags, either 4:3 or 16:9, depending on the encoding.

Woah thanks for the detail but I am quite a novice so don't fully follow all the technicalities of containers and so on...I understand 4:3 and 16:9 but not the other ratio you mention....why is it 3:2 here?

Also in the example you gave where does it specify lossless?

I explained it here:
Look at your DV captures. They are 720x576 PAL frames, but they display as 4:3 when played. The physical aspect ratio of the PAL frame is 5:4. The display aspect ratio for playback of those DV files is 4:3 (or 16:9, if made with a 16:9 DV camera). Lossless AVI doesn't store display aspect ratio flags. The aspect ratio of the frame and the display aspect ratio for those lossless AVI files are effectively the same thing.
Lossless AVI 720X480 = 3:2 physical aspect ratio. There is no display aspect ratio flag in the file. They play as 720x480.
Lossless AVI 720x576 = 5:4 physical aspect ratio. There is no display aspect ratio flag in the file. They play as 720x576.

A video container is a file structure that contains the video data as well as information about what kind of video it is, how it's supposed to be decoded and played, etc. AVI is a container for video encoded as huffyuv, Lagarith, UT Video, Xvid/DivX, DV, unencoded/uncompressed video, some old Intel video codecs from the win95 era, etc., and other codecs.

If you have a video where would you keep it, in your shoe? LOL! You keep it in a file (a container). Another example: a Microsoft Word document in stored in a container with a .doc file extension. A plain text file is stored in a container with a .txt file extension. A JPEG photo is stored in a container with a .jpg or .jpeg file extension.

Other popular containers suitable for various codecs are mp4, mkv, FLV, .mov, and many more that you've seen on the internet and elsewhere. On a DVD, the MPEG encoded video and audio are in VOB files, which are containers specifically for MPEG video authored for DVD disc. BluRay video authored to BluRay disc are stored as .m2ts containers.

Don't get tied up about all the containers and codecs in the world. You'll work with only a couple of them, lossless AVI for capture and processing, and whatever you want for final encoded output.

It's in the codec information. The codec is reported as huffyuv, which is a lossless codec.
Huffyuv, Lagarith, and UT Video codec among others, are lossless codecs.
Sony DVCPRO (DV), h.264, MPEG, AVC1, Xvid among others, are lossy codecs.

Here is part of a MediaInfoXP report on the MB_Edits_Rework.mp4 sample file posted earlier:

The codec is AVC1, a lossy codec used for BluRay and other formats. The mp4's frame size is 720X480, but the display aspect ratio is flagged in the mp4 container data as 4:3.

Hi - I was looking at some of the posts on this forum and came across one from volksjager who said this:

"most of the All-in-wonder AGP card are good
avoid the higher 9000 series as some are susceptible to interference
i have 2 9000PRO cards and a 9200 card, but 7500 and 8500 are good too"

So, based on this, can someone kindly confirm if I have bought a good card with the 9600?

Based on the comments you quoted, which did not mention the 9600 series, the model you chose should work well. The "9000" and "9600" are two different series.

Ah got it thanks for clarifying Sanlyn - I took 9000 series to mean anything 9xxx...so the 9600 will not suffer from interference?

"We prefer the 9000, 9200, 9800 and the 7x00 boards. Some of the 8x00 had and 9600 had shielding issues. The whole model lines was not effected, but a lot of individual cards were."

If you already bought it, why worry about it now unless you actually do a capture and see interference?

Right sorry for the radio silence, have been awaiting the hardware to arrive.

So I now have a 9600 AIW pro with the purple breakout box and the output connectors on the breakout wire. I also have the original cd's that came with the 9600 pro....so far so good I think :)

Now onto my pC hardware. I have an Intel motherboard D865perl which has a P4 2.4Ghz processor but only has 768Mb of RAM. Will this be an issue? It also has 8x AGP I believe. Is this OK?

I will be buying new SATA HDD's for this motherboard so the main OS HDD will run 1Tb and the 2nd drive for captures and edits will be as large as I can find.....

I don't yet have a TBC so apart from this, am I all good to go? Is it worth doing a test capture without a TBC?

Good start, but if you purchased the AIW shown in your earlier link you have a 9600 AIW, not a "pro". But you'll get the same lossless captures. The 9600-series CD came with drivers for all 9600's.

I recall seeing 1GB as the minimum RAM load for XP's entry into its comfort zone in general. But 768MB is odd for a motherboard designed for its best performance with dual-channel RAM. Dual-channel setup means two identical RAM sticks in RAM channel A and, to double that value, 2 more identical sticks in RAM channel B. The only way you could have 768MB of RAM with that motherboard would be (a) two matched 258MB sticks in channel A and a single unmatched 258MB stick in channel B, or (b) unmatched 512MB and 258MB sticks in one of the channels, or (c) An unmatched 512MB in one channel and an unmatched 258MB stick in the other channel. The maximum amount of RAM your motherboard will accept with both A and B matched sections filled is 4GB. 3GB would be closer to ideal, but 1 to 2GB will do. See page 34-36 in your Intel board's reference guide.

You may as well get into it, if for nothing else than to see what you get without the external TBC. It would be nice not to capture to the same drive as your operating system but you won't blow up anything doing so. However, do yourself a favor: don't capture for 2 hours. Make short captures, 10 or 15 minutes, and evaluate the results. If you have problems you can always make a short edit sample and post here. Ask if you need help with that.

Well remembered Sanlyn regarding the AIW. I actually did buy that card BUT then another one came up almost immediately afterwards which had all the accessories and original packaging so I had to buy it.

Yes you are right with the RAM configuration - it is option a in your options. Just out of interest what happens if it runs in an unbalanced configuration? Either way I will look to beefing it up to as near to 4Gb as possible in the coming days.

I will do a test capture and post the results.

Curiously I have this question: if you are doing a capture from a tape that has several old recordings taped over each other, you will have noise bars while the remaining erased recording is starting (hope that makes sense). In this scenario, how can you get the most information from the left over portion of the erased recording while capturing? Some vcr's will display a blue screen until the full picture and sound is available to play while others will try to play the partial picture and sound while the full picture is restoring. Or is it better to capture individual portions of the tape as separate captures? sorry for the long question but this is the best way I can describe it....

Matched dual-channel RAM has about a 10-15% increase in performance over single channel or unmatched units.

You'll likely be somewhat better off and spend less cash with 2 to 3GB RAM than with 4GB. XP can't access 4GB of RAM.

Some VCRs have a menu item that let's you turn off the blue screen, some don't. The menu is accessed with the VCR remote. In any case, don't worry about it. Just play the tape and capture it. Your capture will be post-processed and edited anyway.

RAM is only needed for system stability. Not enough RAM means the system relies on swap, and swap degrades performance. Video itself doesn't really need RAM. (At most, RAM is for large rendering space during complex edits and restorations. It does nothing for capture.)

2gb is perfect for an XP capture system.
- 512-768mb works, but it will generally caused dropped frames
- 1gb minimum for no resource issues
- 2gb suggested
- 3-4gb is just throwing RAM at it for no reason

Dual channel doesn't matter either.

Agreed, dual-channel setup is only a 10% difference if that much, hardly discernible.

Both of my XP capture PCs have 2GB RAM. You're right, that's plenty.

Hi guys- once again sorry for radio silence....is it better to go for a 5400 rpm drive or a 7200 one for the purposes of capturing / editing?

You want a fast hard drive for capture. Get a 7200.

I no longer agree that 7200rpm is required. The rpm itself isn't the determining factor for how fast a drive is. It is only one aspect -- and in the SATA II/III 2tb+ days, a largely unimportant one.

My main consideration is noise and heat.
- 7200 rpm is louder
- 7200 rpm is hotter
It's also why most 5400 are often "green", and 7200 never are. Less power is used, and less heat created (secondary power thus required to keep cool).

- I have SATA III 4tb Seagate 5400rpm drives in my Skylake, and "slow" isn't the word that I'd use for them.
- All my SATA capture boxes use a mix of 5400 and 7200 just because that's what I had on-hand. Most of the 500gb/750gb drives are 7200, most of the 1tb/2tb drives are 5400.

5400rpm is fine for even lossless AVI. But it depends more on the motherboard, SATA/IDE type, and drive specs. I've used 5400 rpm 2tb capture drives for at least 3 years now.

5400 will work but I'm already impatient enough with transferring 46GB captures into 7200rpm drives in a.c. powered enclosures with XP/USB2. I have a slew of 5400 drives for storage. They work well using my OPPO as media player for HD.

USB2 is the bottleneck there, not 5400RPM.

XP/SP2 has USB3? Many have waited for years. Please share.

I dislike nitpicky trivia debates in forums. The final conclusion from my experience: I had 5200 rpm drives in 6 different business office PC's. All 6 users including myself were really really really really sorry, dissatisfied and pissed off until the drives were replaced with 7200rpm drives, which brought an immediate improvement in performance and general office happiness. However, if your mileage differs you should definitely follow your own proclivities and preferences.
:wink2:

What happens with USB3 ports in XP is that you can finally reach the theoretical max of USB2. So it is faster, but not because of drivers, OS or software.

In years past, I'd also poo-poo 5400 rpm. But that was due to hardware of the era. Conversations got more complicated. Don't they always? Now we need to know more about system specs to judge drive speed.

And as msgohan mentioned, USB is the primary speed bottleneck anyway.

All of my ATI AIW systems need 7200 rpm to prevent dropped frames. It's just the nature of the hardware. I've tried to capture to 5400 rpm eSATA in the past, and had issues. I don't think it has anything to do with drive speed here, but other factors.

7200 rpm is erring on the side of caution.

Hi - thanks all fortl the detailed replies for the drive speed. I therefore conclude 7200 is the belt and braces option?

Also I have recently acquired an asus motherboard (P4C800-E deluxe) which has an AGP pro slot vs. the motherboard I currently have which is an Intel D865perl and has an AGP 8x slot. Which one is better for an AIW 9600 pro?

-- merged --

Please can anyone help or advise which motherboard setup to use with an AIW? A motherboard with an AGP pro port or AGP 8x port?

-- merged --

Hi all - I have just come across this site which compares DV capture to MPEG 2 capture and appears to conclude that DV capture is better but I am no expert. Thought it might be worth sharing here: http://www.trevorthurlowproductions.ca/dvmpeg.php

Answers to my previous questions would also be appreciated...thanks :)

There is no such thing as an "AGP pro port". AGP is a type of PC component internal physical connection and graphics processing circuit. Both boards you mention have AGP 8x graphics connections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Graphics_Port

Hi Sanlyn, that is interesting - I checked a cnet site out about those motherboards and it claims that the asus motherboard has an AGP pro port:

1 x AGP Pro ( 1.5 V/ 0.8 V )

Maybe cnet are wrong?

Some mobo makers (ASUS, for one) use that designation to indicate an AGP slot with extra power pins for pre-PCIe "pro" model AGP gaming cards that required more power. Those cards required an extra internal power cable connected to the card, and later mobos had extra power pins to eliminate the power wire. The more common name I'm familiar with for what some makers called AGP pro is "AGP 3.0". However the AIW 9600 Pro is an older 1.5v pre-AGP3 card that doesn't require a power cable or extra 3.3 power pin, so it works in either slot. Your other AIW will also work in either slot. AGP 3.0 slots are compatible with AGP 2X and AGP 8x/4x. My 9600 XT is installed in an old Biostar mobo with a newer AGP slot, and works just fine. But my Biostar didn't use the term "AGP pro". After a bout with Google today I see that the term became more common later.

Of course you can always test the 9600 Pro by mounting it in the motherboard for fit. New "pro" gaming cards with extra power pins won't fit in the older AGP slot. But since neither of your AGP cards don't have the extra power pins, the extra power slots aren't used -- both cards will work.

The install and user guide for the ATI AIW 9600 Pro AGP shows that it works in any AGP 8x slot and requires no extra power. For capture you must install the basic drivers, the ATI capture drivers, and the Control Panel. You can install MMC Media Center if you want, but many don't use it and it isn't required for capture with VirtualDub: MMC uses ATI's MMC capture module. The Media Player is old-hat and has seen its day. You won't need the ATI Remote or Hydravision.

Thanks for your advice Sanlyn - I must admit that I was getting slightly confused with the AGP terminology.

I am nearly ready to install and set up the system now but only have 1gb of ram - will this cause an issue for some initial test captures? Also how best should I capture multiple recordings that are recorded over each other leaving the noise bar between recordings?

Did you mention that I should install XP with SP2 and not SP3? Do I install the drivers you have attached to your last post with virtualdub? Will I then be ready to capture? Is there a dummies guide for how I get started?

Finally if you had a choice between those 2 motherboards, which one would you use?