On Sat, 2005-11-26 at 23:14 -0800, Ajay Sharma wrote:
Oh, and the CPU usage is tiny so you can capture several streams with multiple PVR-150 cards in a decent desktop box.
Just FYI, it's more than just CPU usage. A "raw" analog NTSC video stream (I'm assuming NTSC) is over 30MBps. Considering it goes from card to memory to disk -- possibly all over the same, shared 32-bit @ 33MHz PCI bus (133MBps), it saturates much of the PCI bus, so frame loss is probable.
So having at least an MJPEG compressed stream reduces that far more to a measly 1-6MBps (depending on compression ratio), and MPEG-2 typically to under 1MBps. You usually want to capture MJPEG if you are going to edit the video (especially if you need high quality, individual frames), or MPEG-2 when you only might recorder/cut it or possibly convert it to a lower-quality anyway.