Advice on capture card pci express or usb, for windows 7, umcpmpressed avi

[victoriabears]

I am down to the wire with my last 100 or so VHS tapes recorded in EP or SLP and are NTSC, and want to get them to dvd as best I can.

I have converted hundreds of PAL tapes very happily using my current equipment and editing was not so necessary as commercials in the UK are not every 8 minutes ! , the tapes I have left are of rare material not available anywhere, (believe me I know where to look) which I wish to try and get the very best out of, or are tapes I wish to capture, edit and enhance, both in PAL and NTSC

The equipment I have is:-

VCR = JVC 9911 or Panasonic 1980P

TBC = TBC 1000 (datavideo) or avt 8710

DVD recorders, JVC M100, Pioneer 650 Phillips 3576H

I have Vidicraft detailer 3 and 4

and the "combo" detailer 2 and PROC AMP which on quick review seems to offer the best enhancements.

I have a sima color corrector and ADS Pyro a/v Link which works fine on windows 7 as a device to capture dv, but the ADS software has not been updated so does not work.

I know DV has it supporters but all the reading I have done does suggest uncompressed avi is the rolls royce for that extra value stuff I have.

My budget is flexible and I have tried Canopus acedvio under xp and the quality was not really any better than using VCR>TBC>DVD recorder.

[victoriabears]

anyone?

[usually_quiet]

I'm not doing uncompressed captures with mine, but there have been several threads in the past year suggesting the Diamond/ATI TV Wonder 650 and other ATI TV cards for uncompressed, or losslessly compressed .avi captures.

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/317626-VHS-to-DVD-I-have-a-PVR250-but-considering-s...-else-Thoughts

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/306619-VHS-capture-hardware

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/319205-Which-150-or-under-capture-card-for-VHS-S-VHS-computer

[victoriabears]

I have just return the 650 diamond usb tv tuner combo, could not get it to work under either vista or windows 7, why is making a capture card that is just plug and play so difficult, they all seem to need a degree in computers to get them working.

[usually_quiet]

It would have been good to know which PC capture card(s) you already tried and rejected before making a recommendation. If you need an external device, the next suggestion would be a Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1950. An internal PCI or PCI-E device might be more reliable. Is that an option?

...but maybe you should stick with what you are doing. Getting a capture card to work with your capture software is only half the battle. Next comes avisyth filtering and encoding. People either enjoy the all the required tinkering and geeking-up or they don't, and it sounds like you don't.

[lacywest]

Well ... with my ATI 650 HDTV PCI card ... I have used Cyberlink PowerDirector 8 and PowerCinema 6 .... using the ATI Purple video connector ... I've done video captures from my Mitsubishi VCR and from my Panasonic DMR-E85H DVD Recorder.

With the Panasonic ... I actually captured ... from a DVD playing. ... Was not anything to keep ... just messing around.

Normally if I'm going to do VCR copy to DVD ... I will capture to the Panasonic Hard Drive and then burn it to a DVD

[victoriabears]

I am wishing to try uncompressed capture as am down to my last 100 vhs tapes which are mostly slp/ep ntsc so the quality is noticeably poorer than PAL tapes I bought over from the UK over 10 years ago. I also have a much faster computer now, intel 920/9gb ram etc etc from Dell which I am very happy with and feel it might bring better results.

You are partly correct in your advice regarding frustrtaion with the process, but it is more frustration at getting the computer to simply capture, or what to buy to achieve simply that, a good steady capture, the tinkering and geeking-up I have patience and interest in. I started my project with an advc 300 and was quite pleased with that but again the vcr>tbc>dvd recorder proved more satisfactory for the majority of my vhs collection which were very good recordings.

Thanks for your constructive help, I have only really tried Hauppauge pvr 350 and found the mpeg quality no better and usually worse than the dvd recorder, I DO try to use XP mode wherever possible and then use the computer to edit and join back together if the show is more than an hour, works very well using TMPG products.

I have tried canopus acedvio and mv1000(?), so have never really tried uncompressed capture/editing/enhancement and some of the vhs I have are so special to me I am happy to learn.

I prefer to find a windows 7 solution, but could use XP just on a much slower computer, AMD XP 2800, 3 gb ram, 510 mb video card, or try dual boot, as an optionspeed is not an issue but quality is on this last batch of conversions.

Learning what to expect , what can be achieved is for me the main learning curve, for instance I have found only to go so far in the conversion process and my dvd player (Pioneer 420V) and my TV Sony 46 LCD Bravia version, enhances the product very well if fed with reasonable (Subjective) images.

[usually_quiet]

I thought the Hauppauge HVR-1950 could do uncompressed captures, but maybe I mis-remembered. I can't seem to find a reference to that effect.

The only current devices I know of and have been able to verify are being used successfully for uncompressed or losslessly compressed captures with Virtualdub are ATI TV cards and Black Magic Intensity devices, which are really more for HD captures. Lord Smurf likes the TV Wonder 600 cards, and is supposed to be writing up a guide for Digital FAQ. Others like the TV Wonder 650 and 750 cards. Maybe a non-USB interface or a TV Wonder 600 model would work better.

jagabo said this EasyCap may work https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/302865-So-what-s-new-with-PC-video-capture-cards-th...=1#post1860356

That's all I have for you.

[victoriabears]

many many thanks, all my research tends to make me think i shall try the detailers I have and as LS always says, hardware is a good first try, but I am also having good video luck with the easycap 6 !!. $7 off ebay, all I need to do is get the audio working.
I think the ads a/v pyro dvd has possibilities.

The ATI and other solutions seem to solve nothing and just introduce more problems, amazing how a simple solution does not exist in this day and age

[usually_quiet]

Blame market forces. Only a small percentage of consumers want to do uncompressed or losslessly compressed capture and learn enough to correct it and encode it to an end format themselves. Otherwise, we'd have many solutions for that, instead of hardware and software designed for simplified, fool-proof capture directly to one of the MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 codecs.

I guess I'm part of the majority demographic standing in your way. I found my Diamond/ATI TV Wonder 650 PCI-E card was easy to install in my self-built AMD system running Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit. I mostly use it for recording ATSC broadcasts, but when connected to my STB's S-Video and audio out ports, it does an OK job using hardware MPEG-2 encoding. That's what I hoped for when I bought it, so I'm not disappointed with it for capture. I wish the digital tuner was a little better, but for the price I paid, I can't complain too much.

Perhaps part of the difficulty is in the software. Virtualdub or VirtualVCR attempt to work many different capture devices, both old and new, that were usually designed to be used with other software. ...or maybe the problem is your computer. Some brands have the reputation of building highly proprietary systems.

[victoriabears]

just a note of accuracy, its a Dell , and is the least irritating propierty system I have owned, my computer for 6 years was built locally but this time around Dell was $200 cheaper , its very well made and so easy to access but it is the higher end 9100 style, I suspect the basic machines are harder to upgrade. The dell has worked with everything so far, even works with the easycap ! Which is giving amazingly good quality for what it is.

[vhelp]

Unfortunately, most of the capture cards put out today are geared to suites. You use their software (which is really a third-party's) and hope everything goes as planned.

ATI, Hauppauge, Pinnacle, Winfast, and a few others are all good outfits. The only one of them I saw that had a deceant and workable suite was the winfast, for its real-time mpeg compression feature. The others, ATI and Hauppauge, you have to tweak to get them to work the way they were intended.

The problems with these cards and suites (as I hinted in first paragraph) is that they are third-party owned. The card developers are no where in sight. ATI, Hauppauge and others are gone, left the scene years ago. Now, all you have is a handful of surving staff who are the cheaper paid and don't know anything about the cards and software. Instead, they follow whatever leftover menus or cheatsheets are laying around and follow that to the script, consiquentially never resolving your problems. So, you are left to resort to other means like experiments and tweaking and whatnot.

It is perfectly ok add a usb-2 capture device to your system as long as you use a lossless codec. Even capturing to a usb external hdd is perfectly ok. I do it this currently. My rig is older system:

* April 21, 2007 Sat pm -- new purchase
* MOBO: ECS GeforceE6100SM-M w/ 2gig DDR RAM
* CPU: AMD 64 X2 3600+
* cap card: Haup HVR-2250 pci-e, intermediate (lossless) code -> huffy -> ext hdd
* ext hdd: usb-2 1TB

Bottom line with most these capture cards, get the driver properly installed, and use virtualdub as the capture suite. Catpure with an intermedate lossless codec and you are set for life, or whichever one of you fail

-vhelp 5408

[victoriabears]

I very much appreciate the pointers this forum has given me, hoping everyone is having a good summer.