Tune veejay

Veejay’s performance depends much on the memory bandwidth, CPU and disk access times.

For HDTV (1280×720) mjpeg, you need at least a 2.5 ghz and 1 GB of RAM.
The faster your CPU, the better since decoding is cpu intensive - like some of
veejay’s FX.

For full PAL/NTSC resolutions (720×576 resp. 720×480) DV/Mjpeg you need at least a 1.5 ghz, for lower resolution (352×288) you can do fine with a 500-800 mhz PC.

If you need to record without framedrop, you can do so by disabling audio and
disabling synchronization with the commandline options -a0 -c0

On modern CPU’s (i686) your best bet is working in RAW or MLZO (compressed)
YUV 4:2:0 / 4:2:2 if you need the little extra for FX rendering.

Typical for laptops is slow diskspeed access, on my 1.8 ghz dell latitude laptop
the best I get is an average of about 20.0 mb/sec which is barely sufficient
for playing full PAL avi’s containing RAW YUV.

(you can test yours with hdparm -T -t /dev/hdX)