Yes you are probably right that modern PCs can handle average VCD rates over parallel port. Having worked with many video capture cards, albeit M-JPEG not MPEG-1, on PCI and the Snappy over parallel, I wonder if your average '95-96 computer can handle sustained full motion video over parallel port, particularly when the stuff has to be streaming to hard drive. (There is going to be contention for various system resources ... CPU, port management, hard drive, etc). I'm also interested in the degree of artifacts if you have "full-motion" and pin the bandwidth to vanilla parallel port speeds. VCD titles can be hand-tuned, particularly in high motion segments.
From the Videonics web site:
Python compresses video using industry-standard MPEG-1 at a 200:1 compression ratio, for efficient storage and electronic transmission. MPEG compression is performed by Python's own hardware, in real-time, for fast use without requiring lengthy processing by high-end computers. Wow. 200:1 compression. I'm still a novice at MPEG-1 encoding, but in M-JPEG, we liked to keep compression as low as possible to avoid bad artifacts. Blind 200:1 compression (non-hand tuned)! Can some MPEG-1 compression expert tell me if you can get clean video with that?
Have you seen high motion, full screen, 30 fps video streamed through the parallel port over a sustained time? Are there artifacts and can you actually store the video to hard disk real-time? If you can, I have learned something new and will gain new respect for the old parallel port. Makes you wonder why everyone is shifting to PCI even from ISA. |
