Will a graphics card help my video capture?

shedweller

I apologise if this is a silly question! I have a packard bell desktop with 2 gig of ram, 3 ghz processor. Recently got a video capture device and it "works" but the recorded video (from an old 8mm camcorder) is jerky. Much more than i would like really. The camcorder itself is playing fine.
I have heard that packard bell pc's are problematic when it comes to installing things like graphic cards etc. There is an ATI radeon express 200 already on the motherboard so will it accept a bigger graphics card? And will it improve my video capture?
Any help would be great thanks!

Chuck Finlay

What exaclty do you mean with 'jerky', low FPS?
I'm not quite sure about this, but could you try different settings, i.e. recording in a lower resolution?
Usually video capture is limited by HDD write speed, not by graphic power.

ED E

Sounds like framedrops. What format are you capturing to? If its not AVI, use that as it doesnt require the CPU to compress the video as you rip.

shedweller

Apologies for the delay, i was away with the family!
Lethal Bullet, yes i did notice that there were frames dropped, often more than there was captured....
I'll look into whether it's in avi or not.
Chuck, i tried doing it at a lower resolution (mobile phone sized!) and it still dropped frames as badly.
I'm going to install the graphics card tomorrow and see how it goes.
I believe a defrag will help too.
I was also wondering if i could shut down some non essential processes to lower the load. But am unsure of what ones might be non essential.
Maybe none?:pac: lol i'm such a novice!
Thanks for the replies guys. Much appreciated.

ED E

What are you using to connect the camera? That may well be the bottlekneck.

lmimmfn

for the original post, NO, unless you have a cuda or stream app, whats the cpu & mem( its not a 8 year old P4@3Ghz is it )? as was said most likely a cpu bottleneck or if youre using PATA( cough $hit ) it will eat your cpu cycles, but if its a P4 is junk anyway.

shedweller

Lethal_Bullet wrote: »

What are you using to connect the camera? That may well be the bottlekneck.

Here it is:http://www.pixmania.ie/ie/uk/2617744/art/terratec/grabby-usb-2-0-adapter.html
And here is the card:http://www.elara.ie/products/detailsfull.asp?productcode=ECE1944250
lmimmfn, yes, it is a P4 and the hd is, from what i can tell, a PATA. But there are 4 SATA connections on the board
Anyway, i installed the card but the pc wouldn't boot up. I heard the fan revving up and down and going nowhere. So a power supply may be in order. Oh dear, that may be difficult. It appears that packard bell are kind of s**t and they have odd power supplies. I'll continue researching.

shedweller

I'm thinking this will do the job:http://www.elara.ie/products/detailsfullat.asp?productcode=ECE1750683#spec
My own psu has the following (from what i can tell after some research):

24 pin block to the motherboard labelled ATX POWER
4 pin SQUARE block labelled "cpu" on the plug, "ATX 12V" on the board
4 pin labelled "p2" to the hard drive
4 pin labelled "p3" to the cd drive

The corsair psu appears to have all of the above. Am i right in saying this?