Thinkpads Forum

Hi All.

I would like to setup a video capture on my laptop, mostly to capture videos from VHS and somehow bring it into AVI, WMV or MOV format (doesn't really matter which).

I have a T42p.

Would this system be able to handle it? (I am planning to run captures overnight with no other system activity)

What hardware would I need to capture? My VCR has coax out and RCA out. The ideal would be to capture live, but I'm not sure the processing power required for that.

Any brand recommendations?

You'll want a USB TV card such as this http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products ... rusb2.html

There are other manufacturers too. Make sure you get one with hardware MPEG compression to keep the load on your CPU down.

A T42p will handle digital video with no problems but you will quickly want a bigger disk. MPEG-2 at "Good" quality (a little better than VHS) uses around 2 GB/hour. Either get an external USB drive or get the Ultra-Slim Bay 2nd HDD adapter and throw in a 7K100.

I'm using my desktop as a PVR. I added a 300 GB drive, and within a week was wishing for another.

Ed Gibbs