2. Optimizing your system

Let's begin! The preparatory steps are described briefly. More information can be found in the doom9 FAQs and Forums.

First we need hardware:

  1. A fast and large (second) hard drive. The best would be 7200 rpm, with a large cache, and as many Gigs as possible.
  2. A decent processor.
  3. If you have a VIVO card (graphics card with TV-in so you can use your VCR as a tuner), you should try that first. But, we advice you to buy a separate capture card (which is cheap compared to a VIVO card). Using a TV-tuner card is also good.
  4. If you are capping VHS you can use a capture device with a composite connector. If you are capping SVHS (or directly from TV), better qualitly is obtained by using a capture device with a S-video connector. More information on "Signal types and sources" can be found in section 9.3. 
  5. The best audio quality is achieved if you connect the sound output from the VCR directly to the Line In of your sound card instead of looping it through the TV card.

More tips on hardware selection can be found here: Scubas site.

Which Windows Operating System you use doesn't really matter. A few points are important to know though
OS VFW WDM NTSF support
Win95 Y N N
Win98 Y N N
Win98SE Y Y N
WinME Y Y N
WinNT Y N Y
W2K wrapper Y Y
WXP wrapper Y Y

Information about VFW versus WDM can be found in section 6. If your OS has NTSF support and you format your one of your partitions using NTSF (instead of FAT), you can capture files larger than 4 GB without splitting.

No matter what OS you choose it is really important that your system is perfectly configured and optimized. Therefore, take a look at the following site for more information: Windows Tweaks. Other useful sites can be found by performing a Google search using "windows tweaks".

Please be careful deactivating Windows services! It can happen that suddenly either the Internet or the printer or some other device stops working.

A list of services that can disturb the capturing process (resulting in dropped frames) can be found in the Doom9.org Capture FAQ (see 21). We recommend to read it through.

There is one important thing to configure in system setup: NEVER use the auto-standby or hard disk turn off options. You disable it in the "energy-management" dialog in the Control Panel.

power

Next: Introduction analogue video.

Back to the Index: HOME

Last edited on: 06/10/2004 | First release: n/a | Authors: Version4Team & BaronVlad & Translator SteVe (killingspree) | Content by Doom9.org