Hardware
On the Apple platform, a Power Macintosh running at speeds of 200 MHz or better or preferably a G3 Macintosh is suggested. On the PC platform, a Pentium II or better running at no less than 200 MHz is required. No less than 96M of RAM (random-access memory) is strongly suggested, especially for video capture. It is not uncommon to have 300M of RAM on capturing stations. A very high-quality graphics card is also helpful. A video and/or audio capture card is required with the proper cabling to connect to a VCR, CD player, microphone, cassette player, or whatever the media source may be.

Software
Various compression schemes and encoding software are used to create video and audio for the Web. Generally, video and audio are captured uncompressed and then processed for the Web. Most capture cards come with their own capture software, but other more costly programs such as Adobe Premiere work with many cards and also allow for high-quality editing features. Similarly, audio programs such as Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge offer high-quality features. Once the video or audio is captured, the media has to be encoded and compressed for the Web. Other programs, such as Media Cleaner Pro from Terran Interactive, offer more versatile and higher-quality encoding. Lastly, RealNetworks provides a range of products, including free encoders, that can be used in conjunction with Web delivery of audio and video formats.