Question: New Capture Card

[gabe50200]

Need a little advice: For several years I’ve had a Diamond Theatre 650 TV Wonder PCI Card. Up until Win8 it worked fine, though it was a little buggy in Win7. With win8, and 8.1, it will not load the drivers, doesn’t even see card when installing. If I force an install, I can get it to work, but only Nero Vision will see the card, and only very limited functions.
So…time to move on. My options seem to be another ATI card, but they seem to have stopped supporting them. Haven’t updated drivers since like 2011. Would a Theatre 750 PCI-e be more compatible? Or would a Hauppauge be better? I hear they aren’t as good as they used to be. And which one? I don’t care so much about TV Tuners, used to use the ATI for that in XP, but I have cut the cable and pretty much watch Netflix/Hulu now. More concerned about analog capture (VHS>PC). Have a ton of old VHS/VHS-C home movies only about halfway through converting.
Or, would a USB capture work just as well? They are mostly cheaper than internal cards, but will the capture quality be equal? And what’s best, Haupauge, Diamond (probably ATI based), EZCap or Pinnacle? Have read good and bad about all. Things I care about most: WORKS with Win 8.1 64 (and 10 soon), Stable, supported drivers/software (needs to work with more than just Nero, Virtualdub capture would be a plus), Quality of capture, Ability to choose capture format/codec.

[usually_quiet]

Need a little advice: For several years I’ve had a Diamond Theatre 650 TV Wonder PCI Card. Up until Win8 it worked fine, though it was a little buggy in Win7. With win8, and 8.1, it will not load the drivers, doesn’t even see card when installing. If I force an install, I can get it to work, but only Nero Vision will see the card, and only very limited functions.
So…time to move on. My options seem to be another ATI card, but they seem to have stopped supporting them. Haven’t updated drivers since like 2011. Would a Theatre 750 PCI-e be more compatible? Or would a Hauppauge be better? I hear they aren’t as good as they used to be. And which one? I don’t care so much about TV Tuners, used to use the ATI for that in XP, but I have cut the cable and pretty much watch Netflix/Hulu now. More concerned about analog capture (VHS>PC). Have a ton of old VHS/VHS-C home movies only about halfway through converting.
Or, would a USB capture work just as well? They are mostly cheaper than internal cards, but will the capture quality be equal? And what’s best, Haupauge, Diamond (probably ATI based), EZCap or Pinnacle? Have read good and bad about all. Things I care about most: WORKS with Win 8.1 64 (and 10 soon), Stable, supported drivers/software (needs to work with more than just Nero, Virtualdub capture would be a plus), Quality of capture, Ability to choose capture format/codec.

One member here had a Theatre 750 and has nothing good to say about it. He has an intense dislike for Pinnacle capture devices too. https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/360708-Looking-to-get-a-capture-card?p=2285869&view...=1#post2285869

A Hauppauge USB Live 2 would be a better choice. An EZCap 116 from EZCap.tv's Amazon Listing would also be a better choice. They provide at least some support, unlike a lot of those selling similar devices.

I have the TV Wonder 600 USB. I did get it to work with Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 using capture software other than the manufacturers, but it is long out of production. Driver installation can be problematic and some people have failed to get any drivers to work. I have not tried it with the Windows 10 preview.

[gabe50200]

Thanks for the reply, you pretty much confirmed what I was already thinking. I am both intrigued and wary of the 600 usb. I see really good things, but the driver issue reminds me quite a bit like what I was going through with my 650 pci. Just for the sake of asking, what drivers do you use on win8.1? On the ATI site, 600 usb yeilds no available drivers for win 7 or 8. 600 Pro shows the same drivers I could never get to work right. The Diamond site only has drivers for Vista and XP 64 bit, and 7 32 bit.

[gabe50200]

I was reading another post and this was mentioned: IODATA GV-USB2. Seems to be pretty popular in the retro gaming scene. Drawback is all the drivers and manuals are in Japanese. Has anyone used this for VHS Capture, and how does it rate vs Hauppauge and EZCap.

[FLP437]

Read the usb3hdcap opinions thread, as it is also one possibility and it works fine with analog capture

[gabe50200]

Yes, that's where I saw it, but it's just mentioned in passing. The Thrillness seems to like it alot, but it's barely mentioned anywhere else. A site search only gets three hits, two of which are post you mentioned. Even a google search yeilds few results. Almost all, including all the amazom reviews, are from retro gamers. Not that that's neccesarily a bad thing, it's just that game capture and VHS capture aren't exactly the same thing. The fact that it's almost never mentioned in a VHS capture context, especially since it seems to be exceptional for game capture, had me a little worried that there might be issues. Just wanted to see if anyone had any first hand experience.

[bendixG15]

It looks like the era for VHS tape conversion is about over. Very little recent hardware and not much new software.

My old stuff doesn't like W7 so I took the easy way out. I saved an old computer loaded with XP and the old video hardware and drivers. I can do a bit of tape to disk conversion when I get the urge.

[usually_quiet]

Thanks for the reply, you pretty much confirmed what I was already thinking. I am both intrigued and wary of the 600 usb. I see really good things, but the driver issue reminds me quite a bit like what I was going through with my 650 pci. Just for the sake of asking, what drivers do you use on win8.1? On the ATI site, 600 usb yeilds no available drivers for win 7 or 8. 600 Pro shows the same drivers I could never get to work right. The Diamond site only has drivers for Vista and XP 64 bit, and 7 32 bit.

The Diamond Windows 7 driver package has 64-bit drivers as well as 32-bit drivers. It seems to be the same as the one I downloaded from EMPIA. It looks like I installed both the Windows 7 drivers and the latest Vista drivers from Diamond's website.

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/360406-Anyone-gotten-ATI-AMD-TV-Wonder-HD-600-USB-2...k-on-Windows-8

[gabe50200]

Checked out the thread above, and I'm afraid I may end up like FromPartsUnknown and be no better off than I am now. My machine did not like the ATI hardware/drivers. So I think the USB 600 is out.
Maybe I'm looking at this wrong. Instead of going foward, go back. Let me pester you all one more time:
Option One: I buy the IODATA GV-USB. Further searching suggests it has a eMPIA chipset. Just for the sake of arguement, let's say the gamers are right, and it's as good or slightly better than the USB 600. Cost $39 and change and 2-4 weeks shipping from Japan.
Option Two: In my spare parts I have a winxp installation disc, an AGP Motherboard, an athlon XP dual core 2.2 ghz chip, and a AIW 2006 Edition (9600 based). The AIW was a crappy gaming board, but pretty good at capture with the right drivers (anyone remember Video Soap?). Probably got some ram and a power supply in there somewhere. Everything worked the last time I checked. Only thing I'll probably need is a new case. Cost 1 Case and a weekend, and I have a dedicated capture box.
Drawback is my current rig is about ten times faster at processing video than the one based on the chip above was. I would probably have to save to the capture box, then transfer the 10-20 gig lossless file to newer box for processing. Kind of a pain, but could be worse.
I have an old Panisonic semi-pro AG-1980 for VHS playback, and will mostly be digitizing old band video, got almost every gig i played from the late 80's till the present, if any of that makes a difference.
So what's my best option?

[usually_quiet]

Checked out the thread above, and I'm afraid I may end up like FromPartsUnknown and be no better off than I am now. My machine did not like the ATI hardware/drivers. So I think the USB 600 is out.
Maybe I'm looking at this wrong. Instead of going foward, go back. Let me pester you all one more time:
Option One: I buy the IODATA GV-USB. Further searching suggests it has a eMPIA chipset. Just for the sake of arguement, let's say the gamers are right, and it's as good or slightly better than the USB 600. Cost $39 and change and 2-4 weeks shipping from Japan.
Option Two: In my spare parts I have a winxp installation disc, an AGP Motherboard, an athlon XP dual core 2.2 ghz chip, and a AIW 2006 Edition (9600 based). The AIW was a crappy gaming board, but pretty good at capture with the right drivers (anyone remember Video Soap?). Probably got some ram and a power supply in there somewhere. Everything worked the last time I checked. Only thing I'll probably need is a new case. Cost 1 Case and a weekend, and I have a dedicated capture box.
Drawback is my current rig is about ten times faster at processing video than the one based on the chip above was. I would probably have to save to the capture box, then transfer the 10-20 gig lossless file to newer box for processing. Kind of a pain, but could be worse.
I have an old Panisonic semi-pro AG-1980 for VHS playback, and will mostly be digitizing old band video, got almost every gig i played from the late 80's till the present, if any of that makes a difference.
So what's my best option?

Not only is the old hardware slower, but if any of the obsolete hardware fails it may be hard to replace. Even so, some people find the old AIW cards and their ATI Multimedia Center software to be worth the trouble. You might as well try it since you already have most of the things you need.

The current hardware will still be available if you can't get your legacy capture hardware up and running.