Re: VHS to PC

by Moe Rubenzahl <mrubenzahl(at)videonics.com>

Date:	Mon, 22 Mar 1999 17:55:17 -0800
To:	"Kathy Siddall" <ksiddall(at)attcanada.net>, <hwg-software(at)hwg.org>
In-Reply-To:	northern
	todo: View Thread, Original

|Something like an Iomega Buz is an inexpaensive way
|to do "video capture" which is what you are trying to do.
>This requires a SCSI card? I have heard that they are a nightmare to get
them to work properly.

Buz uses a PCI card. Easy to get running, from the reviews I have seen.
Only reason I did not suggest Buz is that it does not do the MPEG encoding
that the parallel port solutions do. MPEG is the best quality/size tradeoff
and best for web and CD. For standard VideoCD, I -think- MPEG is required
-- but might be wrong about that.

> The others attach via a parrallel port?

Yes. The newest Dazzle model connects via USB (requires Win98), the rest of
the MPEG-1 devices use parallel.

By the way, just so we're clear, all of these devices capture and present
video in a form suitable for VideoCD and web -- typical multimedia
applications. They are not full-motion, full-screen video. They support
30-frame-per-second MPEG-1 SIF (352x240 pixel) and QSIF (176x120) formats.
This looks pretty good (see our web site for examples) but real broadcast
video requires LOTS more disk, bandwidth, hardware, etc.

The info articles at our site give a lot of background:

  http://www.videonics.com/products/python

In particular, see:

  http://www.videonics.com/videos/about-web-video.html

(an article about video on the web).

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