hardware video prefilter do they work or worth it?

[geniv]

I was just watching a sample vcd capture clip from the "OPTIBASE MOVIE maker" MPeg1 encoder board and my jaws just dropped. DAMN! f**king GREAT quality encoding can hardly see any trace of artifact..

anyway despite all the drool that came out of my mouth the card cost $1600+ out of my budget.

on the same website I saw this thingy..
http://www.bernclare.com/mfilter.htm

as quoted:
"M-Filter works by digitizing input analog video signal and feeding it through a series of digital video processing filters and finally converting video back to analog form. As a result video signal is stabilized and gets cleared of random high frequency noise that negatively affects MPEG video compression. "

the card is $500

I'm in the process of purchasing the PV256. I was wondering if anyone has tried the card and if it makes any difference.

I don't mind spending a little extra cash if I can get good improved realtime mpeg1/2 captures.

anyone know of any alternative that's cheaper and works as well?

[Anonymous65]

Filtering video before mpeg compression is very important, unless your source is DVD. Going from VHS, the biggest problem is glitches in the video, and any problems with tracking or vertical sync will create skips in the video and audio when digitizing, or making the audio out of sync when using software encoding. The best, and only solution for this is to get a TBC, time base corrector. Data Video has a (PCI) card TBC for $220, or an external TBC for $300. I just got the external TBC, and it will fix any bad video tape so there are no audio sync problems, and lost frames because of bad vertical sync. It will actually put perfect sync signals on pure noise (or snow). Getting a VHS VCR with digital noise reduction will also help, and has similar function to the unit mentioned in the above post. However, a VCR with a built-in TBC did not do the trick fixing poor video tapes, I found this out the hard way. This is because the built-in TBC is not functioning as a full frame time base corrector, it leaves out the vertical sync. So, for the avid digitizer from video tape, a TBC is almost a must.

[geniv]

do u have any link to the Data Video TBC card?
$220 is not bad. compared to $500.

so your VCD enocoding really show a big difference using the TBC?.

also does it do any improvement on other catpure format ?
AVI, MPEG2/DVD ?

thanks for your help