Hello,

Question is in title. I'll try to be concise in giving some details

I have a VIA 1GHz CPU. That's not a lot. My video source is a simple saa7134-based Pinnacle "PCTV Stereo", so without hardware encoding (so the CPU has to do everything).

Now some facts:
- File size does not matter. I have plenty of space. As long as the DMA 7200rpm harddisk can handle the flow, it's OK.
- File complexity does not matter. I don't have hardware encoding, but I *have* hardware MPEG decoding (if MPEG is your advice).
- Choice of tools is free. I've wiped the disk clean. I can re-install anything needed.
- I'd like an acceptable quality: I don't want to see many little squares moving around; at a normal distance from TV, I want to see a normal VCR quality (actually, it *is* VCR that I want to record).
- The resulting video file should be read-able by Xine.

Given those facts, what is the prefered method for recording a 4/3 video @25fps, preferably 640px-wide, but 320px-wide is OK (in short: record SECAM /dev/video0)?

What do you advise? Thanks,

Yves.

1ghz is plenty. 200mhz is not much. 400mhz is not much etiher. 1ghz is still plenty.

i'd strongly advise using mencoder to encode to divx. you shouldn't have any cpu problems if it's not doing much else. i encode from tv to divx on a 1.2 athlon, and it uses about 25% cpu.

see the examples in section 2.5.3 here: http://mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/tv-input.html