2. Requirements For Recording Videos

When digitizing videos, the most important component besides the graphics board is the hard disk. We recommend a minimum capacity of 10 GBytes or more. The sky's the limit here: the more you can afford, the better. Hard disks starting at 10 GByte up to 20 GBytes currently cost between 100 and 220 dollars.

Before you start with the installation of the graphics board and the supplied software, make sure that your system fulfills the following requirement: DMA (Direct Memory Access) must be enabled for EIDE hard disks. This option is enabled in the Control Panel, as shown in the following figure.

Without DMA it is not possible to handle the massive data streams generated by digital videos. SCSI hard disk owners can ignore this point. The data transfer rates for SCSI systems are high enough and the PC's CPU is relieved of this workload too.

At this point we would like to point out a few general things with respect to the television standards. If your board uses PAL or SECAM (the standards in Europe) by default, then don't be surprised if you can't see anything when running TV mode in northern America. In the United States or Canada NTSC is used. Check the settings of your board to make sure that the correct format is set.