[KLUG Members] Re: Matrox Marvel G400 and video capture -- Marvel/Buz MJPEG and DV camcorder

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Tue, 2002-06-04 at 22:23, Adam Williams wrote:
> I really wish I could offer some followup.  But I haven't had a chance
> to attack the problem.  The hardware is sitting on a shelf :(

I still have my Marvel G200-TV in an old system doing capture.  Love
that MJPEG at 30fps, 704x480.

In this very system, I have an IOMega Buz which has the same Zoran
MJPEG.  The IOMega Buz is a cheap (~$50) way to do it -- but it ONLY
works with Linux (Windows support was dropped over 2 years ago because
of various incompatibilities, long story) -- hence why they are cheap on
eBay.  As a bonus, they have an on-board Advansys UltraSCSI chip --
fully Linux compatible and it includes a bootable BIOS. 

I just got a refurbished Sony DCR-TRV120 Digital8 camcorder for $339
which has analog input (one of the few models that do analog in) and
FireWire out.  So I can take any analog source and make it DV on-the-fly
c/o the camcorder.  It is probably the "new way" to digitize video since
DV is the digital replacement for MJPEG -- per-frame compression (with a
few tricks) at a consistent 5:1 ratio or 3.6MBps at 25fps, 720x480.  The
idea is that your digital optics and DV's ADC are the same
unit/resolution whereas the MJPEG codec is independent of your analog
optics/signal.

The MJPEG codecs are still probably better at encoding pre-recorded
analog input than DV -- it depends on the quality.  But for original
film, the camera is far better.

Unfortunately, none of the new Sony camcorders (like the TRV130, 140 and
others), at least those under $1,000, seem to have the same feature. 
They are analog-out only.  That TRV120 was an one-time deal I found.

-- Bryan

-- 
The US government could be 100x more effective, and 1/100th the
Constitutional worry, if it dictated its policy to Microsoft as
THE MAJOR CUSTOMER it is, and not THE REGULATOR it fails to be.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Bryan J. Smith, SmithConcepts, Inc.   mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org
Engineers and IT Professionals     http://www.SmithConcepts.com