Plextor Convertx

[makkar]

Hi
Any body who have experince with Convertx please comment
Thanks
Makkar

[rbil49]

Hi
Any body who have experince with Convertx please comment
Thanks
Makkar

I can shed some light on the ConvertX and give you my impressions of the thing, since I just purchased it and installed it yesterday.

Firstly, it does appear that the ConvertX does hardware encoding. It can capture to various bitrate MPGs, including VCD, SVCD, DVD, etc. BUT, and this is a big "but" the captured VCD and SVCD (haven't test others as I don't have a DVD burner) are not standard VCD or SVCD files!!! I'm not sure if is the capture device itself or the software that ConvertX uses, but the header in these files are non-compliant.

ConvertX comes with software called InterVideo WinDVD Creator. After capturing to VCD or SVCD files (and you have to use WinDVD Creator to do it, as Plextor in their wisdom will not release code for other developers to develp software that works with this device) you can step through a process to create/burn a VCD or SVCD. This process does create working (S)VCDs, but it seems to defeat the purpose of having hardware encoding. It takes a long time to prepare a movie for burning.

The strange thing is that one of the choices when using this software is to simply capture to a file. So you can capture directly to a MPG on your hard drive. Then if you decide to burn it to a VCD with Nero by dragging and dropping in Nero, Nero says the MPG is non-compliant. And of course it isn't because the headers are all wrong for the VCD and SVCD MPG files it captures!

Now, I don't know if it is the hardware that is placing these silly headers in the files or it is WinDVD Creator that is doing it. In any case, the MPG files are essentially useless, unless you use WinDVD to go through the long process of creating a VCD or SVCD.

This whole thing STINKS and must give one pause to purchasing what is advertised as a "real-time hardware encoder".

The support guy I reached at Plextor knew nothing about this product and probably less about video capturing. I think Plextor should have stuck with doing what they know how to do - CD and DVD burners.

I did find a faster work-around for this problem. Take a MPG file captured by the ConvertX, use TMPGEnc to mulitplex the MPG to a compliant VCD or SVCD MPG file. This happens fairly quickly and it does set the headers properly for these files to be useable for burning with Nero.

My advise for someone looking for a hardware capturing device is:

1) ConvertX will do the job, but you'll be bound to use the only software it supports and will give you fairly good quality VCDs. As stated above, it will not speed up VCD creation like one would hope from a product that is supposed to do direct hardware MPG encoding.

2) For some reason when capturing VCD or SVCD MPG files, the sound is horrible during capturing. All stutters and impossible to listen to while capturing. Don't ask me why? Maybe the device is working so hard doing this compression it can't relay the audio properly to the computer? When doing a DVD capture however, sound is good and you can use the software to monitor the capture. In either case, the sound once captured in the MPG file is fine.

3) If you can live with non-compliant (S)VCD MPG files, then multiplex them with TMPGEnc, you will get to use these files outside of the rather lame WinDVD Create.

Sorry for the long post, but I too searched and searched the Net to find an honest review (or any review) for this product and couldn't find any. The only one was at the case... (can't remember the name) site, and that guy sure didn't discover the shortcomings that I found in his review. Hope this helps someone make a decision. And contact Plextor about this. Hopefully they'll release some code that other developers can use to create software that will capture with this device and write to a compliant MPG file.

Cheers,
R.

[MK_ULTRA]

What about their supposed realtime mpeg4 encoding? I heard that was a crock too.

I'm sooo glad I didn't buy this card, I was close but cancelled the order at the last minute.

[rbil49]

What about their supposed realtime mpeg4 encoding? I heard that was a crock too.

Apparently it will capture MPEG4, but those files are only playable in the WinDVD Player that is bundled with this device.

BTW, called Plextor "tech support" last Friday morning and after arguing with a guy who knew nothing about this product, was told he'd have someone there who knows the product call me that afternoon. Well it's the following Thursday morning and still no call back, nor a response to may email.

Guess I'm stuck with this thing. But it's the last Plextor (and the first, btw) product that I ever purchase.

Cheers.

[sandrewww]

Ok, here's my experience of the ConvertX.

I bought it to save time in encoding while transferring all my family's vhs, hi8, and super8's to dvd..

At first it -appears- not to encode into a format that is burnable straight to dvd... It's hard to tell because WinDVD creator doesn't have any sort of verbose feedback.. or any feedback for that matter.

If you try to burn the video files from say, vegas' dvd architect it has to recompress them.. On all the mpeg-capture settings EXCEPT "high-quality". If you capture clips at "high-quality" in WinDVD Creator, then you do not have to recompress the video.

However, no matter what (all capture settings that I found) It has to recompress the audio into a dvd-ready format.

Capturing at high-quality does save a lot of time in encoding unless you want to fit more than 1 hour 47 minutes onto a dvd. Then you're pretty well screwed. Even though you have to encode the audio no matter what, it goes MUCH faster than video recompression (maybe an hour for a full length dvd.. opposed to 10-15+ hours for video)

ConvertX would no doubt be leagues better if you could configure the bitrate of the capture, and encode in a dvd-ready audio format.

In summary, ConvertX does let you encode in dvd-ready video formats. Not so for audio formats. I didn't bother with mpeg4 yet.