ATI AIW Video CArd or Capture Card Which way to go.

[mr_baldeagle]

Hey all I have home movies and other stuff that would like to transer to DVD. What would be the best way to go. Th emovies will be on VHS and 8mm camcorder. I have seen some capture cards at Best Buy and on Newegg. I don't think I'll need a tuner for TV cuz we are DTV and no local stations here.


Thanks

[mpack]

I would favour the All-In-Wonder (or equivalent from other manufacturers) card.

The problem with a separate card is video preview during capture. For a separate card to display the video while it is being captured, the video data has to cross the PC system bus from the capture card to the graphics card for display: this takes up bus bandwidth, and maybe takes up CPU time as well if the overlay function has to be emulated by Windows - with an all in one card the data never has to leave the card, it can handle the video mix internally leaving all of your CPU and PCI bus bandwidth available for streaming video data to disk. That means you can capture larger frames, and have fewer dropped frames.

Ditto for the audio: the ATI All-In-Wonder doesn't rely on your sound card to capture audio and keep it in sync with the video.

ATI are by no means perfect... Their technical support sucks. Newly released drivers are sometimes buggy or limited in annoying ways... you often have to wait several iterations for a usable driver... but to date I've never found a better solution.

[freebird73717]

I also like the ati all in wonder radeon cards. They do very well for capturing tv or home movie tapes. A word of caution though... if you are wanting to convert your copies of commerical video tapes for archiving to dvd or other source you need to know that you will probably need a macrovision hack and/or possibly a tbc (time based corrector) . For some good info about ati cards and ati capturing visit www.digitalfaq.com.

[lordsmurf]

ATI AIW.
Having a coax input can be handy at times, FYI.