Capture card recommendation??

[fondoo]

Capture card recommendation??

Can anyone recommend me a fast and a high quality capture card?
I would like to convert all my camcorder hi8 tapes to VCD. nothing fancy.
Thanks in advance.

-al

[mike416]

check this out :
http://steve.kittelsen.com/pv231/
I've purchased it and it's indeed very good
I own a $750 broadway card before

[tonyk]

If you'd like something cheap, CompUSA sells the I/O Magic PVR for about $40 - it's a tuner card with Cable, composite and SVideo inputs (audio through the sound card). The card is actually a re-branded StudioTV or similar from Pinnacle(?), and comes with PowerVCR II from Cyberlink. The software provides MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 (VCD and SVCD) captures, but VBR capturing isn't available - it's all CBR, which isn't bad if you're just making VCDs. If you make SVCDs, it'll take more disk space.

Don't expect much support or information from I/O Magic (the manual states that the SVideo and composite connections do not work, but in fact they do) - go to their site and look over the support forums for more info, like 3rd party hacks and such - but the card works well, I've had no problems, and the price is nice too. CompUSA has had sales on these cards in the past, if you want to wait and take your chances to save a few bucks.

It'll make straight VCD-compliant captures, but I normally capture with higher resolution and use TmpGenc to recompress the files. I have the card installed on an ECS K75s motherboard with an Athlon 1800XP and haven't had any problems.

I also have a Dazzle DVCII (around $250), which has a few more capture options, but this card's capture quality is about the same (for a lot less $$). The DVCII also has issues with some chipsets and loss of sync.

--TonyK

[mike416]

Guys,the PV231 is "only" $85
Tony is right,the Dazzle has audio sync issues. I used to own one too
The PV231 give you vcd complient files that you can write directly

[GMFTatsujin]

I've got a GeForce2 MX -- I bought the card for the 3D gaming, the capture bit was a bonus, and despite it not being a dedicated capture card, I've been very happy with the results. It will capture to AVI (no on-the-fly encoding for you, monkeyboy!), but Virtualdub totally makes up for any hardware weirdness. I'm obviously not a pro; this is hobby-level stuff.

Also, I can still play my games.
GMFTatsujin