most important features for a capture card

[drew22to375]

I am going to buy a capture card in the near future and was wondering what are the most important features to look for in a caputre card. I am only planning on converting some of my VHS tapes to DVD.

[tazzila]

Buy the canopus ADVC-100 read the reviews in the capture card section on the left of the screen it is a great capture device audio is always good and no dropped frames I rate it #1

[drew22to375]

Buy the canopus ADVC-100 read the reviews in the capture card section on the left of the screen it is a great capture device audio is always good and no dropped frames I rate it #1

Yeah I was looking at that one. But there seem to be some mention of problems running with WinXP SP1. Anybody know of this for sure?

[mmasw]

well, from everything I've read the canopus mentioned above is a great card.....however...

you said "most important features" and "some" vhs tapes. Perhaps, a most important feature is reducing the time it takes to move your vhs video to dvd.

The canopus as I understand it captures to DV codec which runs at several GB/hour for capture. You'll need a huge hard drive. You'll then have to encode to MPG-2 which will take time. The result will be good..

however I question whether or not this process is worth it for VHS tapes. Especially, if you have tapes recorded in EP mode. It's going to take a lot of time to make one DVD, and the resulting quality will not be better then the VHS source....probably a little worse.

Another option is a card that captures directly to MPG-2. I have an ATI All-In-Wonder 8500 DV. I've captured a lot of VHS video directly to MPG-2 and then easily converted to DVD using UleadMF2. Very simple and the video on the DVD appears to be about equal to the VH source. I set the bitrate to around 2750Kbs and so am able to get about 200 minutes on a DVD. No audio sync issues yet.

Of course, the ATI is a full video card but I got it on sale for 149 dollars so I think it was a good move. There are a lot of cards that capture into MPG-2, however I believe several have problems with audio sync....you'll have to study the comparison charts here if this is the way you decide to go.

[tazzila]

I use the advc-100 with windows XP and have no problems and have also converted many vhs to digital format with very good results. I have a 80Gb hard drive just for this.

[Bob W]

I just use an Aver capture card and capture DVD compliant mpeg2 at 720 x 480 at around 8000 plus bitrate and use NeoDVD to make a DVD file then DVD2one to reduce the size to 4.38GB (if needed) and RecordNow to burn a DVD-R. It works very good for me and you can buy both the card and program today at CompUSA for a mere $10 after rebate (look for a box labeled "AVerDVD EZMaker")

[txpharoah]

You get what you pay for. I suggest the ATI card. Converting VHS to DVD?
I suggest finding a card with realtime hardware MPEG2 capturing. The ATI All In Wonder cards do it quite well. If you buy one, email me back, and I'll teach you all your need to know. I capture in realtime, then reencode in realtime to improve quality from source.

[Yorel]

I'm using TV@nywhere (around $100 here in canada) to cap to DVD format. Splitting and trimming (in TMPEGEnc) time is minimal, around 30 min. Cap time depends on the length of the movie. Author and burn time is about the same as the cap time. No rendering time is involved. Cap'ed one AVI and looked at the render time (About 2 days) in TMPEGEnc, deleted the MASSIVE AVI file, and recap'd in MPG2.

[Marco33]

I have the TV@nywhere card also. $75 US. There are advantages caping straight to mpeg2. I think that is the most important factor. I seem to have problems running any other caping program other than the one that came with it. Some cards are system dependant so, I would contact the maker first with your system specs and ask them flat out. Will you be able to cap at max res with your current system.

[tazzila]

Do what you want. I feel I gave you the best advice on a product that will give you the best results. I have been capturing video from vhs and camcorders for over 18 months and have used many capture cards all seem to have problems except the advc-100 it is a true plug-in and use never have any problems no little tricks to learn no fancy settings to correct problems. It works great no flaws just cost more than the cheap cards. This is a product that falls into the you get what you pay for dept.

[drew22to375]

Thankx everyone for all of the helpful replies. I think I am going to go with the ADVC-100.

[ktnwin]

For only 10$ (plus 2.48$ tax), the averDVD capture card is worth a try. I bought it (because of the bundled neoDVD software) and use neoDVD to capture / encode my DV tapes in near "real time".
I have made tons of DVD this way and it's quicl and quality is great. (I capture my VHS tape via the pass thru mode of my DV camcorder).
I have not tried the averDVD capture card yet. I plan to get a second PC and will install this averDVD card on it.