Will my TV card suffice or should I upgrade?

[Gemz]

Hiya,

I have an oldish (circa 1998) tv tuner card, and was wondering if it's possible to use it to rip from VHS to (ultimatley) VCD? I've not used it in a while... anyway, it's a Hauppauge WinTV PAL-I 61205 Rev BM. It has a TV aerial socket, line out, s-video, line in and Vid (a yellow port.

So - can I use this to rip videos to VCD or had I better upgrade - and which is best for quality/price?

I only require to rip VHS from my VCR, I dont have a digital video camera or anything to worry about... :)

Thanks,
Gemz

[LanceSteel]

I think your overall system will do fine. As long as you can find drivers for it for whatever operating system you are using. I capture with a STB tv pci (1996) using virtualdub. I can get up to 640x480 but after that the picture gets flakey.

[aguillon]

The only problem I foresee with your setup is the size of the files.

Typically this kind of card will capture using some proprietary MJPEG codec which does not have high compression ratios.

A couple of ancillary problems:

1- 2 gig capture avi file limit, therefore a time limit per capture of something like 20-30 minutes if you lower the quality of capture
2- You will need to re-encode the video to mpeg (not a problem, you can use something like TMPGEnc)
3- If you want to capture long videos, hard disk space might become an issue on your system

Cheers

[Roginator]

You shouldn't have any problem using this card.

To avoid the 2GB limitation on AVI files, simply use multi-segment capture in VirtualDub or use AVI_IO.

I'm hoping you are using Win98se and have a computer with a decent speed and hard drive size.