Multitalented: All-in-One Graphic Boards

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So What Do These Video Streams Mean In Practice?

We have translated the measured video streams into more understandable values. For one, we wanted to find out, how many Gigabytes of data were generated in an hour of recording. On the other hand, you can see the maximum length of a video (in minutes) that can be attained if you want to save your video onto a CD-R.

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Low Resolution	Stream (kB/s)	Data capacity needed after 1 hour recording in Gigabytes	Video length (minutes) possible on CD-R with 700 MB
3dfx MPEG2	305	1.0 GByte	39 min
ATI MPEG2	420	1.4 GByte	28 min
Asus ASV1-AVI	425	1.5 GByte	28 min
Matrox MJPEG LQ	715	2.5 GByte	16 min
Elsa MJPEG	822	2.8 GByte	14 min
Matrox MJPEG HQ	1425	4.9 GByte	8 min
High Resolution	Stream (kB/s)	Data capacity needed after 1 hour recording in Gigabytes	Video length (minutes) possible on CD-R with 700 MB
ATI MPEG2	550	1.9 GByte	22 min
Asus ASV1-AVI	1333	4.6 GByte	9 min
Matrox MJPEG LQ	1585	5.4 GByte	8 min
Elsa MJPEG	1606	5.5 GByte	7 min
Matrox MJPEG HQ	2734	9.4 GByte	4 min
3dfx not possible	Row 12 - Cell 1	Row 12 - Cell 2	Row 12 - Cell 3
pre-compressed	Stream (kB/s)	Data capacity needed after 1 hour recording in Gigabytes	Video length (minutes) possible on CD-R with 700 MB
ATI 720x480 VCR2-AVI	113767	390.6 GByte	0 min
ATI 320x240 VCR2-AVI	36252	124.5 GByte	0 min

If you only intend to leave the videos on the hard disk, then full TV resolution is your best choice. This offers the best quality, however, you don't want to try this with a hard disk that has less than 10 GB space. If you want to make videos available to others later, then you can save these onto a CD-R. The suitable format should then have half the resolution. 3dfx's MPEG 2 solution seems to be best here. For ATI users, the preset for MPEG 2 (IBP frames) could be improved. Users who can afford to take the time to experiment with the settings can extract up to 45 minutes more.