I'm running a TINY business converting vhs/camcorder movies to DVD. I was using my JVC 920 miniDV. However, as often happens in JVC miniDV's; the firewire port died.

I bought it from ebay, so there is nothing I can do.

I went out and bought a dazzle hollywood-dv unit for 200. It does a great job so far, however I've only done a couple of small captures to test it out. It encodes the analog video to digital ONBOARD, audio AND video.

I used to own a gf4 ti200 vivo, but sold it. I hated capturing with it because the quality was iffy and I always had problems capturing. Either it was an audio problem or wrong codecs, there always seemed to be issues.

i own a radeon9500 pro, which I know i could sell for about 140-150.

I'm curious how EASY and how GOOD the radeon9700 aiw does for video capturing? How does it compare to your average pci capture card? How easy is the software?

Thanks! The dazzle unit is firewire and does the encoding onboard. It makes the process hassle free.

dazzle unit - pricematched so it cost me 216
radeon9500 pro - worth about 150
total - 366

radeon9700 pro aiw - about 365 from newegg.
radeon9800 pro aiw - about 399 from newegg

the other advantage to the dazzle unit is that you can mult-task like a dog with rabbi's. There isnt the huge processor usage that you have with capturing using a video card.

I've encoded two other movies at the same time, burned a dvdr, browsed explorer AND captured a movie using the dazzle at the same time.

I'd appricate some educated thoughts on the matter though.

thanks a mucho.

tom