Multiple Simultaneous Video Capture - is it possible?

[PortoLad19]

Hi,

I have about 60 videos that I need to convert to digital for onward DVD authoring. I have started into this and completed about 5 tapes so far, however it is extremely time consuming . I am using a Canopus ADVC 300 with a well spec'ed Dell XPS. During capture the machine is hardly breaking a sweat which leads me to believe it must be possible to run a number of captures simultaneously.

Is this something that any of you have experience with? What is the best hardware / software for the job?

Many thanks in advance.

Porto

PS - if you need any further info please let me know.

[danno78]

I have done two simultaneous recording from two VHS tapes with two tuners and save each (uncompressed) on different HDD. With 5 players, five tv tuners (or 5 Canopus boxes) and multiple disks may be possible.

[PortoLad19]

Thanks Danno.

What software would I use?

The default Microsoft Movie Maker s/w will only allow one session at a time.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Our software (see signature) can capture from multiple DV sources. I've used it to capture 15 x 1 hour tapes in less than 4 hours by using 4 camcorders simultaneously with the same PC.

[danno78]

In my case (tuners) it was two filters of graphedit. For DV sources you should follow Johnny advice.
One graph filter:

[PortoLad19]

Thanks guys.

John - I will give your software a try!

[jagabo]

I heard of people capturing six videos simultaneously with the Hauppauge PVR-250. Or maybe it was the PVR-500 (the dual tuner version). It's easy to do with all the hardware MPEG2 encoders because all you have to do is save the MPEG stream to a file. I believe you can also record multiple videos using several Hauppauge HD PVR USB devices (hardware h.264 encoder).