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.
| 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.
