--- You wrote: The Wings card will give you analog audio only, in two modes: 1 stereo miniplug, or composite left/right out with two female RCA jacks. It provides L/R analog audio In via the standard microphone mini-jack (Apple Plaintalk jack-extended mini) or again, with composite L/R RCA jacks. Video is I/O composite and I via S-VHS. Sorry, no digital (scrounge for an AudioMedia III card or an M-Audio card). Keep your eyes open on the LEM swap list; you can obtain one for approx. $50-$60 dollars. I am not sure, but I believe the Rev. 1 card (which appeared OEM only on the beige tower and user-installable via separate purchase) did not support DVD encoding - I think that was handled on the Motherboard. Some other colleague, correct me if I am inaccurate re: the DVD info. Best regards, Dana --- end of quote --- To my knowlege, there were three personality cards that will fit any Beige machine. There is a straight audio card, which takes analog in and will put analog out. But of course, analog in means that you can digitize sound for storage on your hard drive, editing, burning to cds. That is, the straight audio card carries an analog to digital converter and a digital to analog converter. No problem.
The second card had the above, plus the ability to digitize video, in other words, an a/d d/a video converter. But keep in mind that the video available on the personality cards was low grade compared with what is available today. As far as I know, the video on this second card will work, in and out, on any rev mother board. The third card has a DVD converter that allows DVD playback with a dvd playback drive. It has video in and out, even svhs video connectors, and has a better audio chip than the earlier two cards. The DVD version is the one I bought for my rev 1 Beige minitower. I have never been able to get the video in to work. I think it requires a rev 3 board which had superior on board ATI video. Also, never got the hardware DVD decoder to work. That should give you some idea of what's out there and what it will do. Some folks would have you buy a pci audio card, and if you are going to do high end audio and you are not satisfied with the quality of the audio on your personality card, that's what you should do. But be sure to test the pesonality card audio first. It works fine for me and my standards are pretty high. Also, keep in mind that a pci audio card takes up one of three slots that you may need for other stuff. I may be missing something here. If you are looking for digital output, like the optical output on a good cd player, you might need a card capable of such a thing. I'm over my head here. It should also be noted that the video on personality cards is very obsolete by today's standards. The choice way to get video into your computer is through a firewire port from a digital camcorder, or a video digitizer that feeds the firewire port (some camcorders can convert analog video to digital in real time...mine does and it costs under $400.) The video quality is of a much higher standard than was available from a personality card. Firewire pci cards are cheap enough, and getting a combo card (firewire/usb) saves a pci slot too. Also, today few computers use hardware to decode DVD. The Apple DVD player current versions (os 9 or x) do it through software. You need a fast enough processor and an additional video card (except maybe with rev 3 motherboards.). The Beige level Macs are perfectly capable of state of the art video production with the proper upgrades. You need a firewire port, fast cpu and lost of disk space. Costs money but it is still cheaper to upgrade (usually) than to buy new Macs. I did it step by step over about a year. Works fine for me. Hope this helps, Rich -- G-List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- We have Apple Refurbished Monitors in stock! | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> G-List list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/g-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
