[NCLUG] Linux video questions

[Benson Chow]

I've been playing with vid cap for a little while.  Currently I'm using an
older BrookTree 878-based PCI video capture card, and I have to admit that
its quality is only 'acceptable'.  Sound, I use my on-board audio, I'm
sure this is much better than the crappy audio provided by my card (which is
monural only).  I hear that ATI older (Radeon) AIW's with their vid cap
devices work, but I haven't tried them.  Even older AIWs (Rage and Mach
based) have bt848 devices so they would definately work.

My current video solution is using this card and using the
mencoder/mplayer suite for recording/playback, and using wine/virtualdub
(GNU Win32 app) for editing, with appropriate codec (using libavcodec with
mencoder, which seems to work with the free DivX bundle 5.0.5 that's
needed for virtualdub/wine).  Not perfect, definately, but it seems to
work okay.  I haven't found any good native video editing software yet.
I don't see why virtual dub won't be ported to linux sometime, other than
the 1000000s of microsoft-isms necessary in VD.

Also I had a lot of issues with the bt848 driver with my KT133 card.
Don't use video capture cards on any Via KT133 boards or older - You'll
get crashes due to hardware bugs.  Also, mencoder basically used up all
CPU cycles on an athlon 850MHz CPU encoding 30FPS, 640x480.  Even my
P4-2.4GHz can't seem to playback and record a 640x480 stream
simulataneously without dropping frames (??? something seems wrong here.)
X11, PCI/AGP, and IDE traffic all become issues when working with video,
so you'll need ot make sure all are performing fast.

Dunno anything about firewire, or about the editing suite that was made
specifically for some video cameras (there are some tools available for
one JVC I think, and it can do editing as well).

hope this starts off your search, and maybe someone else can answer some
issues.  I've not been able to compile mencoder/mplayer with sse2, maybe
that could speed things up, else this p4 is just slow.  Anyone else have
suggestions for "good linux software"?

-bc