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Does FireWire need a powerful processor to stream video at the highest quality?

post #1 of 9
6/24/06 at 3:25pm
Thread Starter 
Will capturing video with FireWire and my AMD Duron 1.2ghz be fine and without stuttering? Because I hate USB streaming with this comp.

Will the quality be the same as my friend's Pentium M 1.73ghz? If yes, I'll buy the port.
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post #2 of 9
6/24/06 at 3:58pm
Thread Starter 
because I heard from someone here that FireWire needs little to non resources to stream video while USB needs alot of processing power.
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post #3 of 9
6/24/06 at 4:11pm
You are right in that Firewire was designed to use as little CPU power as possible. In fact, with Firewire, you can even hook up 2 devices directly without needing a computer to mediate the communications. This is not possible with regular USB (they later introduced USB-on-the-go to do something similar).

That being said, there are 2 issues:

How fast is the hard drive. Capturing live video from a DV Camera is fine, but the hard drive will be a bottleneck. The higher the RPMs, the better.

Second, are you simply capturing the raw video or are you running it through some algorithm (compress to Xvid, etc.)? If you are just capturing raw video, no problem. If you are running it through another program, then the faster the CPU, the better.

There should be no quality difference, except during playback, and only because the components in the computers are different. However, the actual video files will be the same quality.

Regards,

zakaluka2.
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post #4 of 9
6/24/06 at 4:15pm
Thread Starter 
I'm just capturing the video, and then converting it to DVD. I won't compress the file into divx. So, in fact, will my Duron 1.2ghz be fine while streaming firewire? Will I have no framedrops?
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post #5 of 9
6/24/06 at 4:38pm
Yes, it should be enough. Like I said, the hard drive may prove trouble-some. If it is too slow, frames will be dropped to compensate for the slow writes. However, the only way to find out is to test it. I have never tried capturing video on a 1.2 Duron.

References:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58636
http://tech.yahoo.com/xg/troubleshoo...roblems/152949
http://www.windowsmoviemakers.net/Tu...veCapture.aspx

Regards,

zakaluka2.
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post #6 of 9
6/24/06 at 6:53pm
Thread Starter 
my hard drive is 5400 RPM. Is it good enough?
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post #7 of 9
6/25/06 at 2:59am
Unless you have a need (such as editing or special effects) for uncompressed video, you could get an external MPEG encoding card. Pre-encoding the program stream cuts the bandwidth and storage needed by several orders of magnitude. MPEG2 is also DVD compliant, saving time if you intend to burn it.
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post #8 of 9
6/25/06 at 12:06pm
Firewire was designed with its own processing unit in order to use little to no system resources. USB is processed by the system CPU.
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post #9 of 9
6/25/06 at 6:56pm
@desir3: I *personally* recommend 7200RPM, but there are loads of people who do this with 5400RPM drives and are very happy with it. However, I really like olyteddy's idea. An external video converter would really help you out and reduce the strains on your system.

Unfortunately, I have no experience with external video converters, so I can't really help you there.
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