win98/hauppauge wintv

At this point (which was about the same time as I was trying BeOS, and Linux out) I started to discover the main problem with video capture: the size of the data set that is created. I was trying to get the best possible quality, which meant full frame PAL with CD audio sampling. No, stop laughing now – I was new to this. For those that can’t see the joke, try this:

768 x 576 = 442,368 pixels per frame
x 2 = 884,736 because we want at least 16bit colour
x 25 = 22,118,400 because we want nice 25fps motion
 
44,100 x 2 = 88,200 bytes per second for mono 16-bit sound
x2 = 176,400 bytes per second for a full stero stream
 
Total: 22,294,800 bytes per second video stream

Now this wasn’t going to happen with the motherboard and hard drives I had at the time, so I went and had a think and decided that the best method was to get a capture card that could reduce the amount of data I needed to capture.