Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 06:42:20 -0700 (PDT) From: just matt <matt@dqc.org> To: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> Cc: Charles Henrich <henrich@sigbus.com>, freebsd-multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Video Capture Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.21.0008190623360.29616-100000@dqc.org> In-Reply-To: <14749.44638.762175.805304@guru.mired.org>
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Don't believe the hype about the ati boards having MPEG/MJPEG hardware compression. As far as I've seen, they don't have what they advertise. I purchased an ATI TV-Wonder a few months ago because it advertised hardware realtime 30fps vcd compatible mpeg compression, all done exclusively in hardware, which I confirmed by e-mailing their tech support people to make sure it was true. Turns out it's a huge lie, the "realtime" mpeg compression is all done in software, with generally crappy results when you compare the mpeg's it produces to those of a real hardware encoder. You need a pII-300 or better just to start playing with it, which made me pretty angry. And no, there aren't any chips on the card to indicate that it will support hardware mpeg capture in the future. In fact, the card is almost exactly like my hauppauge, and composite video in worked with fxtv right out of the box. I imagine it would be fairly trivial to add support for this bt848 based frame grabber. As far as the ATI All-In-Wonders go (which is what the GATOS project is all about if I remember right), I have a friend who has one of those, and there isn't any magic hardware compression on that card either. Instead, ATI provides software that allows people to record video in their own ATI VCR codec or something silly like that. It's proprietary, but I guess it's supposed to compress video better than the traditional .avi format (and I'm not talking mpeg-4 based .avi's) that has been traditionally used with framegrabber software. Hmm, well, that's my rant against ATI. If you want a real mpeg capture board, they will run you at least $400 or so. I ended up getting a low end mpeg capture board and just piecing together an older pc for windows <shudder> as the board isn't supported under bsd. Such is life... - Matt On Fri, 18 Aug 2000, Mike Meyer wrote: > Charles Henrich writes: > > Are any of the MPEG/MJPEG hardware compression boards supported under FreeBSD? > > Check out the GATOS project <URL: > http://www.core.binghamton.edu/~insomnia/gatos/ >. That runs on > FreeBSD, and supports some of the ATI boards with on-board > MPEG/MJPEG. I'm not sure if it's got support for the MPEG/MJPEG > hardware. > > <mike > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-multimedia" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-multimedia" in the body of the message
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