6800 GT and video capture

I'm looking at purchasing a Alienware Aurora system with a Nvidia 6800
GT card in it. I'm mainly interested in gaming but I'm also interested
in Video editing and burning videos to a DVD. The new system specs are
:
Windows XP pro SP2
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ CPU
ABIT AV8 MB
1GB Dual Channel DDR PC-3200 SDRAM
Nvidia 6800 GT 256MB DDR3 mem
120 GB Seagate 7200 RPM SATA drive
120 GB WD ATA drive, (for backups)
NEC ND-3500 Plexwriter dual layer DVD +-R/W Recorder
lite-on CD-RW drive
Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS HD 7.1 sound card


Does the 6800 allow video capture or is there something else I will need
to add to the system? What I would like to do is copy video off a video
camera or a VCR edit it and burn it to a DVD. I'm not sure what is
involved so any help is appreciated.

Thanks,

The standard 6800 GT has no video capture capability. (I own one, from PNY.)
I don't know whether anyone makes a 6800GT with video in, but I presume that
if Alienware offered one, they'd say so, as it would be an extra feature.

Alienware sells an external video digitizer from Pinnacle (with a firewire,
aka IEEE 1394, interface). I don't digitize video, so I have no idea whether
this is a good solution. Some digital camcorders can also digitize analog
video; I wonder whether something like that would be competitive.

I'd recommend a 160 GB hard drive over the 120. The price difference is $16,
which isn't bad for an additional 40 GB. Is there any reason that you didn't
make the second drive SATA as well?

Is 1 GB of RAM sufficient for video editing? (This isn't a rhetorical
question.)

Getting a CD-RW drive as well as the DVD burner seems sort of redundant, as
the NEC is also a fast CD burner. (I may be prejudiced. I have a DVD-ROM
drive plus a DVD burner. I see that would cost $7 more than the two
burners.)

HTH.

Bob Knowlden

Address may be scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.


"WhoKnows" wrote in message
...
I'm looking at purchasing a Alienware Aurora system with a Nvidia 6800
GT card in it. I'm mainly interested in gaming but I'm also interested
in Video editing and burning videos to a DVD. The new system specs are
:
Windows XP pro SP2
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ CPU
ABIT AV8 MB
1GB Dual Channel DDR PC-3200 SDRAM
Nvidia 6800 GT 256MB DDR3 mem
120 GB Seagate 7200 RPM SATA drive
120 GB WD ATA drive, (for backups)
NEC ND-3500 Plexwriter dual layer DVD +-R/W Recorder
lite-on CD-RW drive
Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS HD 7.1 sound card


Does the 6800 allow video capture or is there something else I will need
to add to the system? What I would like to do is copy video off a video
camera or a VCR edit it and burn it to a DVD. I'm not sure what is
involved so any help is appreciated.

Thanks,

The 2nd 120 is one that I have in my current system. I was just going
to move it over. I have a 120 and a 40 in it now. Once I get
everything moved I can cannibalize the 120 out of the old system.

I thought the memory was sufficient. There was an 'build it' article in
Extreme Tech that built a multimedia PC that was supposed to do vid
editing and it had 1GB of memory. They used a ATI Radion 9600 Pro and a
Hauppauge WinTV tuner. It's really not clear how they get the video in.
I was going for a little more graphics performance hence the Nvidia
6800. I guess I'll need to figure out what the best method of capturing
the video is. The 160 sounds like a sound idea.

Have you had any experience with Alienware stuff? They seems to get
good reviews. I've never dealt with them, but with the special they
have going on the price seems right.

Thanks for your reply!!!
Best

In article , says...
The standard 6800 GT has no video capture capability. (I own one, from PNY.)
I don't know whether anyone makes a 6800GT with video in, but I presume that
if Alienware offered one, they'd say so, as it would be an extra feature.

Alienware sells an external video digitizer from Pinnacle (with a firewire,
aka IEEE 1394, interface). I don't digitize video, so I have no idea whether
this is a good solution. Some digital camcorders can also digitize analog
video; I wonder whether something like that would be competitive.

I'd recommend a 160 GB hard drive over the 120. The price difference is $16,
which isn't bad for an additional 40 GB. Is there any reason that you didn't
make the second drive SATA as well?

Is 1 GB of RAM sufficient for video editing? (This isn't a rhetorical
question.)

Getting a CD-RW drive as well as the DVD burner seems sort of redundant, as
the NEC is also a fast CD burner. (I may be prejudiced. I have a DVD-ROM
drive plus a DVD burner. I see that would cost $7 more than the two
burners.)

HTH.

Bob Knowlden

Address may be scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.


"WhoKnows" wrote in message
...
I'm looking at purchasing a Alienware Aurora system with a Nvidia 6800
GT card in it. I'm mainly interested in gaming but I'm also interested
in Video editing and burning videos to a DVD. The new system specs are
:
Windows XP pro SP2
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ CPU
ABIT AV8 MB
1GB Dual Channel DDR PC-3200 SDRAM
Nvidia 6800 GT 256MB DDR3 mem
120 GB Seagate 7200 RPM SATA drive
120 GB WD ATA drive, (for backups)
NEC ND-3500 Plexwriter dual layer DVD +-R/W Recorder
lite-on CD-RW drive
Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS HD 7.1 sound card


Does the 6800 allow video capture or is there something else I will need
to add to the system? What I would like to do is copy video off a video
camera or a VCR edit it and burn it to a DVD. I'm not sure what is
involved so any help is appreciated.

You would use the Hauppage to capture video.
The best Hauppage would have hardware encoding, so the cpu won't have to do
it.

--
Ed Light

Smiley :-/
MS Smiley :-\

Send spam to the FTC at

Thanks, robots.

WhoKnows wrote:

I'm looking at purchasing a Alienware Aurora system with a Nvidia 6800
GT card in it. I'm mainly interested in gaming but I'm also interested
in Video editing and burning videos to a DVD. The new system specs are
:
Windows XP pro SP2
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ CPU
ABIT AV8 MB
1GB Dual Channel DDR PC-3200 SDRAM
Nvidia 6800 GT 256MB DDR3 mem
120 GB Seagate 7200 RPM SATA drive
120 GB WD ATA drive, (for backups)
NEC ND-3500 Plexwriter dual layer DVD +-R/W Recorder
lite-on CD-RW drive
Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS HD 7.1 sound card


Does the 6800 allow video capture or is there something else I will need
to add to the system? What I would like to do is copy video off a video
camera or a VCR edit it and burn it to a DVD. I'm not sure what is
involved so any help is appreciated.

You'll need a capture device of some sort. If you have a digital video
camera that can encode analog video for input over the Firewire port, that
would be the best reasonably-priced way to go, otherwise to copy off a VCR
you need an analog capture card. The Hauppauge boards work but they're not
the most cost effective or reliable solution. In a cheap board look at the
Compro board or others based on the Phillips video chips. In an expensive
board look at one of the Matrox or Canopus dedicated video capture and
editing solutions.

Thanks,

--
--John
Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

Currently, the NV40-based cards (6800GT only, NOT the NV43 or 45s: Ultra &
6600s) do not have a functional WMV decoder, only an MPEG2 decoder. This
will never be fixed with a driver update either. It's a hardware glitch.

So, you may want to look at a different card. nVidia has been somewhat
hush-hush on this, unfortunately.

"WhoKnows" wrote in message
...
I'm looking at purchasing a Alienware Aurora system with a Nvidia 6800
GT card in it. I'm mainly interested in gaming but I'm also interested
in Video editing and burning videos to a DVD. The new system specs are
:
Windows XP pro SP2
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ CPU
ABIT AV8 MB
1GB Dual Channel DDR PC-3200 SDRAM
Nvidia 6800 GT 256MB DDR3 mem
120 GB Seagate 7200 RPM SATA drive
120 GB WD ATA drive, (for backups)
NEC ND-3500 Plexwriter dual layer DVD +-R/W Recorder
lite-on CD-RW drive
Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS HD 7.1 sound card


Does the 6800 allow video capture or is there something else I will need
to add to the system? What I would like to do is copy video off a video
camera or a VCR edit it and burn it to a DVD. I'm not sure what is
involved so any help is appreciated.

Thanks,