[H-GEN] Video Capture under your choice of Unix.

Hilton Travis Hilton at QuarkAV.com
Mon Jan 27 16:28:05 EST 2003


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Hi David,

On Mon, 2003-01-27 at 10:52, David Jericho wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Jan 26, 2003 at 11:45:34PM +0100, Bruce Campbell wrote:
> > What would people use to capture quality video (not just frames) under
> > their preferred varient of Unix? [1]
> 
> Well, while not my preferred variant (although, one of the better
> ones), I have most recently used my Indy with its VINO hardware.
> 
> Much easier and less hassle to use than most PC solutions I've had the
> misfortune of playing with.
> 
> Quality on the composite and svideo inputs it surprisingly good.

SGI (Irix) boxen have always had quite good video capture performance
(with the necessary hardware, of course).  The same cannot be said for
their Windows NT boxen (SGI 320, 540 and etc) - they are dogs, lemons
and all other bad names you can use.

> The nicest card I've ever had the fortune to use on a regular basis
> unfortunately had the annoying "feature" of only working under Adobe
> Premier. Pinnacle Systems DV500, no Linux drivers, and the vendor
> won't release any interface specs. It also managed very nice realtime
> MPEG compression, with the most CPU usage being the PCI streaming. 

I have a DV500 here that I (unfortunately) use with Premiere and Windows
XP.  I'd *really* like to find a comparable Linux-based OS and package
that would allow me to not have to run Windows on this machine.  I'll
soon have a chance to try Broadcast 2000 and a few other things on it,
and have heard that Broadcast 2000 actually has DV500 support.  Any more
information I can get on this will be appreciated, and I'll definitely
report my findings in here.

I'm looking at producing DivX formatted output.  I'd prefer not to use
proprietary video formats as my output.

> > Bonus marks for mentioning the Osprey 220 (viewcast.com), which happens to
> > be the video capture card that I'm using[2], and extra marks for anything
> > which produces acceptable QuickTime.
> 
> The standard IRIX video capture stuff will produce QuickTime, as well
> as MPEG. 
> 
> Out of curiosity, what model do you have, and where did you buy it?
> The Osprey stuff looks to be good quality.

The Osprey cards are quite good.  They are most definitely not cheap,
but they are solid.  I can source these cards if you are interested, but
I do not stock them.  I have sold a number of them, no issues to date
(unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the DV500 - even though it
works well when it works).

> > [2] NT is annoying for remote-controlling of encoding servers.
> 
> I dunno. SQLSlammer does a pretty good job of it ;)

ROFL

-- 

Regards,

Hilton Travis                   Email: Hilton at QuarkAV.com
Manager                         Phone: +61-(0)7-3343-3889
Quark AudioVisual               Phone: +61-(0)419-792-394
Quark Computers
(Brisbane, Australia)            http://www.QuarkAV.com/

Non Linear Video Editing Solutions & Digital Audio Workstations
 Network Administration, SmoothWall Firewalls, NOD32 AntiVirus
  Conference and Seminar AudioVisual Production and Recording

War doesn't determine who is right.  War determines who is left.


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