CompuServe Messages

Jeff, Your description of MPEG is almost right but not accurate enough, we should also mention that it also considers the previous frames and all the frames are considered all together, not just the delta to the key frames. Because of this nature, MPEG is not suitable for the video editing purpose. Please find MPEG FAQ on Internet for details. Motion-JPEG (M-JPEG) just stored each frame as a JPEG compressed frame. They are both lossy compression format. Nothing come cheap, more compression ratio you gain, more loss of data. Find JPEG FAQ on Internet for details. As to the PC-based M-JPEG capture board, nothing come close to the TrueVision Targa 2000 that I use yet. Its listed price is around US$5000. For lower priced products (less than US$1000), miro DC1 TV, Fast Movie Machine Pro (with M-JPEG option board), and Intel Smart Video Recorder are the ones being recommended by New Media. I have used all of them, they are all good boards in price/performance. Intel SVR Pro being the easiest to install (most of people can't understand this is really a great achievement of Intel until you tried to install all the other boards on the market place and failed with headache) and give good output. Miro board has the build-in S-Video encoder and gives the best quality output to video tape, but its performance to computer's monitor is not so good. Fast is good in all but lacks the encorder (you have the option to buy) to output video to tape. –Vince, Ulead Systems.