Advice on MPEG hardware realtime capture cards

[Chris11115]

Hi, I'm fairly new to Capturing and making VCDs but need advice on which card to use for capturing. I'm looking to capture VHS to normal VCDs to play back on my DVD player (which does allow VCD playback thankfully). I want to be able to capture straight to mpeg then onto VCD, and I want to do this the quickest way possibly without using up a lot of hard drive space, so I assume I need a MPEG hardware realtime capture card instead of a TV tuner. However, which one to pick I'm not sure on. I'm on a fairly tight budget for this and can only afford to spend £100 to £200 on one. I originally thought of the Dazzle DVC 80 USB, but having seen the reviews it doesn't look as good as once thought. I'm not especially fussy on quality, and don't really intend to make SVCDs or DVDs, so really just the basic card. So if anyone could advise me on which to buy i'd be very grateful. Thanks in advance.

[Anonymous65]

The best card available, the PV231.
http://steve.kittelsen.com/pv231

[ggtronic]

I have chose the Ati all in wonder radeon to do this job

and i realize that vcd ( 352x 240 ) had poor resoution
on my 32" jvc , but the capture works good and the cd
is easy to burn ( cd creator 5 or nero 5 )

i was having the same goal then you but now i'm working
on Svcd , so think twice on your choice .

gege

[ggtronic]

i forget
i recommand a minimum 1 G processor to run
this Ati all in wonder radeon

[RFontenot]

ATI AIW is a good choice and you don't need a 1Ghz CPU for high quality captures.

ATI uses a software MPEG encoder, but it outperforms many hardware MPEG encoders. Check out the following review of various MPEG encoders.

http://tangentsoft.net/video/mpeg/reviews/

I do real-time VCD captures with no dropped frames on an PIII 800Mhz using PC-100 SDRAM. I can also do up to 640x240 MPEG-2 captures with no dropped frames and very good quality.

For highest quality, I use my ATI to capture at 640x480 VBR MPEG-2 @ 15Mpbs using I-Frames only. The quality of these 640x480 MPEG captures is equivalent to 640x480 AVI captures using VirtualDub and Huffyuv 2.1.1. In addition, I can use either the ATI scheduler or the Guide Plus Program Guide to schedule my recordings.

To turn these captures into a high quality VCD or SVCD, I use TMPGEnc to encode and Nero to burn.

RF

[jeg_jason]

A very cheap alternative to what you want advice about is the AverTV Studio card which sells for around $80 in the US. I made several VCDs with very good quality from VHS and Super VHS tapes. Also please post your computer profile to make sure that your processor and memory is adequate for this job. This is especially nice because you do not have to replace your graphics card and saves a load of money and time yet still gives pretty good results. Further details on the card can be found on the Avermedia website so I would check it out first before dropping a lot of money.