I use an Asus A7V133 motherboard with a 1.4GHz athlon, 1GB ram, about 650GB of drive space, and an ATI all-in-wonder 128 for the video capture/playback, under win2k. Also an SBlive for audio. The video card isn't the newest or fastest, but the video quality is excellent both in and out. With a well-done DVD rip in DIVX format, connected to a widescreen TV, it's vastly better than VHS ever was, and generally beats the cable feed I get from teleworst. Not up to the original DVD of course, but pretty damn good all the same.

The biggest problem with the ATI card is that it doesn't support dual-head use, ie the TV out and the monitor out have the same source. This means that the VGA out runs at TV rates when it's outputting SVHS video. Other than that it's fine. Not much good for modern 3D games at high res, but this is after all a video recorder.

Also, the ATI player software that comes with the card seems to be better than more or less everything else I've tried, and vastly better than Mediaplayer. It never seems to crash at all, which is what's wanted in an application like this.

The real problem with the whole setup is the noise. It's all in a YeongYang 0221XB server case, which is an 18-inch cube with many many fans. 7 hard drives, HUGE fan on the processor, chipset fan, PSU fan, and three case fans adds up to a lot of whooshing. I looked into fitting drive silencers, but the amount of heat this thing dissipates precludes most of the normal quieting solutions. I may end up sticking it in the attic and running the video/audio over a 2.4GHz video sender. Or possibly putting my shuttle spacewalker under the TV and streaming everything to that.

pca