Nekochan Net

Can anyone comment on the overall capturing quality of the O2 AV1 board? Say compared to the Personal Video in an Octane?

Just want to know if its worht the extra $$ when purchasing an O2.

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I know Personal Video on the Octane can do capture at 1280x1024 and various lower resolutions. I'm fairly sure the analogue O2 A/V is limited to 720x576, but the digital video O2 option might be able to do the full 1280x1024. The Personal Video also can only capture one stream at a time, the O2 (both options) can do 2 at a time like the Octane digital video.

Correct me if wrong, but I believe the Octane PVO doesn't offer compression, only I/O, whereas the O2 does hardware MJPEG compression. That means you'll need a fast disk setup to do realtime capture on the Octane, and video will subsequently need to be compressed using a much slower software method, preferably after transferring it to a Mac or PeeCee. The O2's realtime compression yields decent video quality and can be ported across platforms, a few quirks aside. Overall, the O2 would probably be more convenient as a capture platform.

Regardless, any respectable O2 should have the A/V capture board, so yes, spend the extra $10 for it.

And if you want a more subjective opinion on video quality, I have found PAL captures of VCR tapes to be better than the VW320 video in, and much better than a consumer level (Adaptec PCI) capture board and the SunVideoPlus. And the O2's capturing software is better IMHO.

But the O2 is very sensitive to video glitches on the source tape - in my experience, a slight jitter resulted in lost frames on the O2, whereas other capture devices performed better with the same tape. And on the O2 you are stuck with older formats for captures, rather than the more universally editable MPEG2. But at least it can then play captured video back in real time (due to the VICE chip). My O2 struggles with PAL MPEG2 playback. There is a PCI MPEG2 decoder available for the O2, but I've never heard from anyone who has used it.