Hi,
We are currently looking for a tv tuner card/ tv capture card to be able to watch tv and more importantly record tv news shows at a good quality from a coax cable input. We are building a website that monitors Bolivian tv news shows, and the recordings from the TV card would be uploaded at either google video or yourtube and then be embedded in the site so the tv captures need to have a good quality.
We currently received a very old Compaq Deskpro EN in donation, the computer has a Pentium 3 Processor at 733 Mhz with 384 of RAM. We have recently updated the original hard drive to a Samsung SP0802N (80gb 7200 RPM) and also added a NEC DVD burner. We don't have any idea on what type of graphics card or sound card this computer has (if anyone can point me in the right direction on how to do this I can post the specs of the sound and video card on another post)
An anandtech review pointed out that the ATI TV Wonder Elite was one of the best choices in the market, any thoughts on this? what about comparable cards from Hauppauge or any other vendor that might be cheaper?
We also have a Dell Inspiron 6000 with a Pentium Celeron M at 1.30 with 512 of RAM and a 80gb hard drive with 5,400 RPM and a bus of 16MB that we would also like to use to capture video with another tuner (we would need to record two news shows at the same time - one on the compaq and one on the dell - and I believe that our current computers could not handle a dual tv tuner) I have been looking at some PCMCIA cards and the Hauppauge WINTV-PVR-USB2 USB 2.0, any thoughts on this?
Our budget is $200.00 USD, yet if we spend less it would be a great.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post.
H.
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My recommendation would be to avoid software based capture cards. This includes everything made by ATI. I have not used USB cards, but I am a little skeptical of them. I have the Hauppauge PVR-350 and it is the best capture card I have ever owned. Hauppage is selling it for $149 US right now. The PVR-250 is just as good and you can save money by buying it instead because the only difference is that the PVR-350 has a connector to output video directly to a TV that the PVR-250 doesn't have. You probably don't need the TV out option and if not, you can buy the PVR-250 for cheaper than the PVR-350.
All of ATI's cards use software encoding. You will get terrible results on both of your PCs with any ATI cards unless you do only MPEG-1 captures at low resolutions (352x480 or 352x240). ATI cards are good if you have very fast CPUs and disk drives (at least 7200 RPM - quality will suffer badly at 5400 RPM). I started out doing captures almost 6 years ago with a 1 GHz AMD CPU and an ATI All-in-Wonder card and I gave up on it because it couldn't do full height DVD resolution captures (720x480) with a CPU that slow. I moved to PCI cards that do on the fly hardware encoding, starting with a Dazzle DVC-II card (not produced now) and then getting a Hauppauge PVR-350 after a friend recommended it. With your PCs you need a card that does hardware encoding, so Hauppauge is a good choice for you.
Please do not make the mistake that many new people make and think that if you record a video at 352x240 it will be smaller than a video recorded at 720x480. Bit rate is what determines the size of your encodes, not resolution. The larger your video bit rate, the bigger your encoded file size. Lowering the resolution will help improve quality if the bit rate is low, but it won't make the file any smaller. -
You could get two of the following cards, but keep in mind that they come without any capturing software:
http://www.provantage.com/avermedia-mtvpvr15p~7AVER029.htm
According to the manufacturer's website, you need Windows XP Professional to make it work, even when is advertised for Windows Media Center.
http://www.aver.com/2005home/product/tvtuner/pci/pvr150wb/pvr150wb.pdf
Buena suerte.No tengo miedo a la muerte. Solo significa soñar en silencio. Un sueño que perdura por siempre. .. -
You may consider this ati card with hardware mpeg encoder:
http://www.provantage.com/ati-100-703205~7ATIT42L.htmNo tengo miedo a la muerte. Solo significa soñar en silencio. Un sueño que perdura por siempre. .. -
Thank you for your posts! I just checked the anandtech article on the ATI TV Wonder Elite and its says that "What we wanted to see was a hardware MPEG-4 encoder from ATI and what we got instead was the promise of the best hardware MPEG-2 encoder ever. Although it's not the promise we wanted, ATI did deliver exactly what they set out to do."
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2393&p=9
Any thoughts on that? Is the ATI hardware decoder that good?
Thank you! -
You might think about the ATI All In Wonder 2006 Edition AGP. I believe it's the same price as the ATI TV Wonder Elite PCI.
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Saludos a mis vecinos de Bolivia,
No tengo experiencia personal con la ATI TV Wonder Elite, pero he escuchado buenos comentarios de varios usuarios. La gran ventaja de esta tarjeta es que usa un chip especial para procesar video y sonido directamente en formato mpeg2, de esa forma, el CPU de tu computadora no tendrá gran carga de trabajo.
Como ya habia dicho antes, vas a necesitar un softwares para la captura y otra para la edición del video, yo en lo personal uso ChrisTV professional para capturas, pero no es gratis, tienes que comprarlo.
No tengo idea cual será el formato final para publicar los video en internet, vas a usar mpeg2 o tienes planes de usar compression maxima en DivX?. Recuerda que la mejor calidad de video es mpeg2, pero los archivos son algo grandes, mientras que DivX los archivos son pequeños y pueden descargarse mas rapidamente en la Internet.
Son muchas variablesNo tengo miedo a la muerte. Solo significa soñar en silencio. Un sueño que perdura por siempre. ..
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