Advice: Recomended Quality Settings

[mattsm]

I have a 1.4ghz celeron, 256mb pc133, and I am using a WinTV capture card.

I was hoping everyone on the forums could give me some advice on quality settings. Size is not really an issues. The main issues are speed, I need it to not completly bog down the CPU since it is used for other things also. Additionally it would be nice if the bitrate is low enough to stream over a wireless network.

But mostly I am posting to see what settings everyone else is using and more specifically what people are using who have similar setups as mine. Any information about settings in the BETA version would also be nice

Thanks

PS I am also sure there are other threads about this somewhere. If anyone can point me to those that would be helpful as well.

[attisb]

Near DVD Quality

or

DVD Quality

[mattsm]

I was sort of hoping for more fine tuned settings. I have tested the default ones and none of those seem to fit my conditions very well. Such as the Near DVD won't stream over a wireless network.

[attisb]

For wireless:

Use 20 FPS
Bitrate should be no more than 300 as most wireless networks have trouble streaming higher.

[V_D_O]

Such as the Near DVD won't stream over a wireless network.

Really? My 802.11b network handles a bitrate of 4.5 million with ease, at 5.5MB/s. And near DVD is only 2.13 million.

I was sort of hoping for more fine tuned settings

I have a very similar configuration of RAM, capture card and CPU(1.1GHz Celeron), and my settings are as follows:

Audio: WMA7, 128kbps 48KHz, stereo
Video: WMA8, 320x240, 60fps, 4.5 million bitrate, deinterlacing enabled.

My computer and network handle these settings with ease - recording CPU usage is 60-70%.

Since you have a (slightly) faster processor, try dropping the fps to 30 and raising the resolution to 640x480 (or 25fps and 720x576 for PAL). I can't, though.

[mattsm]

Can you drop the fps to 24 since thats all TV are designed to show? Or am I missing something? (Supposing I will be viewing the recordings on a TV)

[mattsm]

Whenever I record at 640x480 my cpu usage always shoots upto 100% does anyone else get this?

[V_D_O]

Whenever I record at 640x480 my cpu usage always shoots upto 100% does anyone else get this?

Yup. That's the software's way of telling you you need more hardware. Specifically, a faster CPU. Preferably a P4.

[MattS]

As long as you are not setting your resolution to 640x480 you shouldn't have a problem with your CPU getting overly bogged down. You may want to try some customized resolutions to see if you can get higher bit rate recordings at lower processing cost.

ex. 480x480, 352x480 etc.....

[jquevedo]

My 2Ghz P4 cpu utilization, shoots up to the 95-100% range when recording with my current quality settings. But the video does plays smooth and does not appear to be losing frames.
If anyone is interested, here are my quality settings:

http://www.geocities.com/jjqnet/quality.html

[MattS]

The default NearDVD FPS setting is insanity --- 25 - 30 fps is plenty good.....

Never set the quality to 100 -- this will surely bog down the computer -- 90 - 95 is generally best....

If you lower the frame rate etc... to sane values -- use a less CPU intensive codec like WM7 -- you can up the bit rate a little bit and get much better results.....

640x480 resolution is some large video -- really stresses the computer -- you could also try some custom resolutions like 480x480 etc....

[zurv]

i stream (and cap) using wm7 (low cpu) @ 2mb. 128 wm9 audio. no problem with CPU usage nor wifi issues. 640x480 - of course

I then have it re-encode to wm9 900k.


my server is running athlon 3200xp w/ 1gig of ram. win2k server.