Alan
Just read your latest article in May issue.
[Americans regard Brits as "foreign", isn't that cute? I guess they don't realise that they're foreign.]
You were *lucky* to be called foreign. On my first visit back in '81 I stood in the immigration hall trying to make sense of it. Having had my passport scanned, I was firmly told by a female camp commandant to make my way to an adjoining hall and stand in line with the *other aliens* ?? I checked in the nearest mirror to indeed confirm that I had grown three heads and started looking for a line up that resembled the Star Wars Bar. I'm sure the American immigration service scour the depths of human depravity to come up with the worst examples they can find - then ship them all down to work in immigration at Miami international airport. The next visit I went in through New York - much more civil - they grunted at me in a decibel level which at least left my ears with 10% usability, but why does an *alien* need ears anyway?
MPEG1 ?
I wish to produce best quality mpegs to be burnt to CD and played back on PC at full screen through the latest windows media player. I have looked at the Dazzle & the Snazzi and am now looking at the Miro MP10. Having already made horrendous buying mistakes, I'm trying not to repeat same. Have *you* formulated any clear thoughts re mpeg yet?
Regards
Ken
Yes, I've been the alien bit, too.
There's the Snazzi, the Dazzle, the VideOh!
and the MP10.
I've not tried the Snazzi, it's a PCI card. I've tried the others.
All of them have advantages and limitations,
and bugs. There's three phases:
1. Capture.
2. Editing
3. Making the CD
1. On capture. All of them seem to work,
but the MP10, on the one I've done so far,
has lost lip sync. There's not much between them. Getting any of them working can be horrible, read my article, or it can be a doddle. The Dazzle doesn't capture sound (but there's a newer version that does, and anyway you capture sound in your sound card, it works fine).
2. MPG isn't designed for editing. Of the three, the MP10 software seems to me to be the best for editing.
3. Output. I've not made CD Roms, but the
Dazzle doesn't have CD Romability, as I recall. The others do.
Which would I buy? I'd probably get both the
VideOh! (in spite of the difficulty of explaining to someone over the phone that you want to buy a VideOh!, and the fact that
AFAIK you have to buy it in the US and import it) and the MP10.
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I got the Queens Award for Technology for my software
To put in my pennies worth, I have got the MP10. I haven't had any problems with lip sync ( even over a 30minute video) or difficult installation. In fact the installation was a revelation to me after the hassles I had with the Marvel G200 Marvel. The MP10 has worked from day 1 apart from one problem that required removing and re-installing my AWE64 sound card. I bought win-on-cd 3.6 to burn VideoCD's with. If I need any editing I do that in Premiere and then use the MP10 to convert this to MPEG. It takes a bit longer but the editing is so much easier and accurate.
best regards
Steve Allen
I'm quite taken by the MP10, as long as you save your work frequently so that when the software crashes, you haven't lost an hour's editing. For making an MPG video out of raw
footage, it's rather nice. Of course, you
cant do all the stunts you can do when editing an AVI.
Hmmm. I say "of course". On reflection, I don't actually see why not.
I'm also a lot keener on the iEdit
software that came with the Dazzle, I
think I've managed to make it work for me.
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I got the Queens Award for Technology for my software
I would like to know if any of the products Alan mentioned encode to the whitebook standard for creating VideoCD's.
MP10 does, so does VideOh! (you pronounce
it with an emphasis on the O and a glottal stop to signify the !).
I don't know if you can get the VideOh! in the UK; you might be offered the Sphinx
instead and get told it's the same product. The hardware is the same, but there's different software, so i dobn't know if that will do the job.
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I got the Queens Award for Technology for my software
Alan,
Actually the MP10 isn't white paper compliant yet. There is a problem with the audio datarate which should be 224 Kbps but the MP10 provides 192 Kbps. There is however a beta sofware version upgrade that will allow Video CD compatability but only using the converter not the capture. I haven't used the Beta version so I am only going on reports on the MP10 forum.
best regards
Steve Allen