PV256T Provideo

[drstout]

Can anyone tell me how this card compares to the ATI all in wonder card?

I want to use the capture card for transferring 8mm video to svcd.

thanks

[fourthquark]

I have a Provideo PV256T. The main diffference between it and ATI All-in-Wonder card is the PV256T has a harware MPEG2 encoder chip, while the ATI uses a software encoder. This means you can do full-screen DVD-quality capture with the PV256T even with a less powerful CPU. The ATI, being a software encoder, requires a powerful CPU to capture directly to DVD-quality. However I have never used the ATI so you should search the forum for details, like how powerful a CPU you need to capture SVCD quality, and whether the ATI lets you capture directly to SVCD format.

The PV256T has a preset for SVCD captures and I am told it produces fully-compliant SVCD that can be written directly to CD, with no post-capture re-encoding required (I have not done this myself). It also has a preset for DVD, but my v1.4 software captures audio at 44.1KHz, whereas fully-compliant DVD is 48KHz audio. Hopefully this will be fixed in future software releases.

I have done some captures with the PV256T from the built-in TV tuner using the SVCD and DVD presets, and the SVCD captures are very good, almost indistinguishable from the DVD captures. But these captures are from a poor source (TV tuning via rabbit-ears antenna)and maybe from a good source there would be a visible quality difference.

There have been several postings on the PV256T over the last several months. Search the forum for "Provideo" in subject line, with time set to 2 months or more.

Overall I like the PV256T and I think it has great portential, but the product is not very common, and the software is relatively immature, still with some bugs. You certainly won't see it in a list of supported devices for after-market video-TV-recording software, for example. If I had to do it again, I would probably get a harware capture device from one of the more well-established manufacturers, perhaps Dazzle Digital Video Creator II, or Hauppauge WINTV-PVR. Also, I believe that ADS has just started selling a hardware capture device based on the same chip used by the PV256T. But if you have a powerful computer perhaps the ATI would suit your purposes. Read the forums and decide based on your needs.