What's ViVo good for?

[Thomas Engler]

Hi!

I'm thinking about buying a new graphics board and the X800 Pro came
into consideration. There are some cards that offer ViVo but I've yet
to understand what this is good for. I know that it stands for "Video
in Video out" but that's not the point
I understand that ViVo is different from an AIW, i.e. only AIW offers
TV on-board. One thing I'd like to do in the near future though is to
digitize my old VHS- and camcorder-tapes. Can I plugin my VCR or some
other video device into the ViVo and get the video stream onto the
harddrive? Or do I have to have an AIW for that?
And what does the ViVo separate from the regular ones? Are they the
same speed concerning the memory and the GPU or are they somewhat
crippled?

Tnx.

Thomas

 

[J. Clarke]

Hi!

I'm thinking about buying a new graphics board and the X800 Pro came
into consideration. There are some cards that offer ViVo but I've yet
to understand what this is good for. I know that it stands for "Video
in Video out" but that's not the point
I understand that ViVo is different from an AIW, i.e. only AIW offers
TV on-board. One thing I'd like to do in the near future though is to
digitize my old VHS- and camcorder-tapes. Can I plugin my VCR or some
other video device into the ViVo and get the video stream onto the
harddrive? Or do I have to have an AIW for that?
And what does the ViVo separate from the regular ones? Are they the
same speed concerning the memory and the GPU or are they somewhat
crippled?

The difference between a VIVO and an AIW is that the AIW has a TV tuner,
while the VIVO just has S-video and/or composite inputs, but the VIVO also
has two display connectors while most of the AIWs have only one.

In terms of performance there's no systematic difference between them--any
differences are the result of individual decisions made by the board
manufacturers. For a long time the AIWs were clocked lower, but the ATI
9800 AIW was clocked faster than the standard board, so even that's not a
hard and fast rule.

You need to look at the specific hardware.

As for recording from your VCR, in principle that works, in practice
sometimes with some boards you run into Macrovision problems even on
non-protected recordings. But you'd get better results using the S-video
input on a digital camcorder that has pass-through from the analog inputs
to the firewire output--all of them don't have this capability though.

 

[John Russell]

Hi!

I'm thinking about buying a new graphics board and the X800 Pro came
into consideration. There are some cards that offer ViVo but I've yet
to understand what this is good for. I know that it stands for "Video
in Video out" but that's not the point
I understand that ViVo is different from an AIW, i.e. only AIW offers
TV on-board. One thing I'd like to do in the near future though is to
digitize my old VHS- and camcorder-tapes. Can I plugin my VCR or some
other video device into the ViVo and get the video stream onto the
harddrive? Or do I have to have an AIW for that?
And what does the ViVo separate from the regular ones? Are they the
same speed concerning the memory and the GPU or are they somewhat
crippled?

Tnx.

Thomas

It's a cheap option for digitising video if top quality isn't important. and
digitising is all it supports. Compression into recognised video formats is
the job of codecs run by the CPU. The supplied software isn't always up to
the job resulting in compression artefacts and lost frames. But you can use
any video software, not just that supplied. For best quality use a DV codec
as used by DV cameras. Then recompress using a twin pass MPEG2 encoder if
DVD is your target.