Is my capture card broken?

[tramp]

I bought a Hercules All In Wonder 9800SE last week. Viewing and capturing terestrial TV is fine, but when viewing or capturing from VHS or Sky I got static pops in the audio every 40 seconds or so. Also the sound from Sky sounds distorted. I am just connecting with an RF aerial. I've not seen this problem mentioned anywhere else and suspect the signal from my VCR or Sky box is somehow overdriving the card's input. Turning the line-in and master volume in Windows down, and even muting the sound doesn't stop the pops in the captured video. I've emailled Hercules support and scan.co.uk where I bought it from but haven't heard back yet.
Could someone with some experience of this let me know if my card should do this or if it sounds faulty?

[Bright1]

Tramp,

I think I could be your best buddy........did you know that your card can be softmodded to a 9800 Pro AIW card?
wxw.ocfaq.com <---
Its a simple process, just get the softmodded drivers - install - reboot and you're done. Its not guaranteed, mind, but theres a good chance you can turn a £160 card into one thats worth around £300.
I have the same as you (Hercules 9800SE AIW) and I bought it at Scan
too and it softmod's perfectly, no dodgy bios shenanigans either, its done purely in Windows.

Back to the topic, I dont think your card is faulty, i'd look elsewhere for the problem, perhaps changing leads or changing audio connectors.

If you can sort the problem out and have success with the softmod drivers you're onto a winner.

Cheers,

B.

[tramp]

Thanks for the reply. Have you tried to capture from a VCR or Sky? If so how are you connecting? I'm wondering about getting a SCART to sVideo lead if I can because extracting the sound and cleaning it before burning it takes too long for my liking.
What I really want to know is should I expect to be able to connect a VCR just using an RF aerial without pops or would this cause a problem with other capture cards?

[tramp]

For the benefit of anyone who has a similar problem, I still don't know if the card should do this or not, but I can work around if I take the audio seperately out of the VCR into my sound card with a phono lead and I get clean audio.
Question is now I had been using my VCR in another room to push Sky/video around the house into all rooms. If I put it back there I'll get the crap sound back when capturing from Sky. Buying another VCR just to clean up my audio is an option but seems stupid - Is there a cheaper way I could seperate out RF signal into RF and phono?
If not it would seem to make more sense to give up on capturing Sky with my PC and think about getting a consumer DVD recorder instead.
Hope this helps someone else.