What would work for my system

[csaag]

A newbie to video capture, but not to computing.
I'm looking to simply transfer my VHS tapes from my analog camcorder
to the PC for burning a VCD to play in my standalone DVD player (Pioneer)

My PC is a 2 year old Aptiva. I upgraded the CPU to a AMD K6-2 500mhz (which is about the limit for my system). 192 mb of pc100 RAM.
2 USB ports and 1 open PCI slot. The video is on board 4MB ATI AGP.
I could disable it, but I would obviously need a PCI video card (Not sure if if I'd want to give up AGP for PCI). 6GB hard disk space (about 2 GB free). No firewire. Cendyne CDRW

I'm trying to discern my options (short of a new PC which I'm told isn't an option) IAFAIK I either go with a USB device or a PCI video capture card.
I think the Dazzle bridge (~$300) needs a 1394 port and I don't have one (and $150 is about as high as I'd like to go). I haven't heard the best things about the Dazzle DVC80.

Looking for recommendations on what to look into. Thanks.

[Dave B]

The biggest constraint on your system is the HD size. 2GB will unfortunately only give you a few minutes of decent AVI capture so you will have to look at realtime compression.

Your processor isn't powerful enough to efficiently encode real time video so your only real avenue is hardware MPEG compression. For $150 take a look at the Hauppage WinTV PVR. This will encode both real time MPEG1 and MPEG2.

I still have doubts as to if your system (especially the HD) can support even this card. I would suggest that you try to contact the hardware vendor and other users of the card (there are some on this site) to find the minimum PC specification.

It may actually be more benficial to spend some of your $150 budget on a second harddrive and then buy a cheaper TV based AVI capture card.

[Mirror_Image]

Stay away from USB capture devices as if they were the plague.

[csaag]

thanks, Upgrading the hard drive is doable. My CDRW is hooked up as the secondary device on the hard drive's IDE (DVD-ROM is on the secondary IDE) , but I imagine I could switch things around. I'll try and check out the needed specs first.

As far as the other response on avoiding USB's go. If that turns out to be my only choice w/o getting a new system, then what are the drawbacks?
thanks again.

[deadpac]

The only thing I see for your computer is a Dazzle DVC I .

I mean why bring in an analog source into your computer and have to go through the hassle of encoding and with your machine it looks like that could take a while, no offense. I have a p2 400mhz box that basically takes too long when just encoding to MPEG-1. An uncompressed 24bit RGB AVI at 43 minutes takes 6-8 hours to encode with filters on mostly noise reductions, I guess if you didn't use filters you could achieve 4-6 hour encodes but then again you don't even have that much space to work with.

Sorry to say unless you like LONG encoding times for MPEG-1 then your only 2 options are a Dazzle DVC I [shouldn't be more than $100 with rebate] or something similar like a Creative Movie Blaster or that other mpeg encoder card everybody used to talk about......pv231 or dv or something or rather. Or buy a new computer, but if you really want to save money there just build your own, an ECS mobo doesn't run more than $50 and a good AthlonXP 1800+ isn't more than $60 and 128mb DDR 1600 for that mobo could be as low as $20 that's about $130 right there and if you want a really cheap ps buy SForge power supply for about $30 take everything out of your case and stick in your new components using your existing monitor keyboard mouse hard drive CDRW agpvidcard and case that's a pretty good barebones setup for only $160. And for more HD space buy a bare drive say a 40gb at $50 that's about $210 maybe a really cheap 128bit SB card for $15 and your grand total is $225. and if all you're going to be doing is encoding to MPEG-1 this computer should last a good while untile you get a new computer and even then this computer can still be your main MPEG-1 encoder and nothing else.

[Greg12]

I think you should get a new system, your just not set up for video encoding.


You need a huge hard drive if you want to use firewire, let's try 60gigs.

You need

[lpn1160]

I'll second the above opinion, your system just ain't built to capture video

[KingJohn]

The only thing I see for your computer is a Dazzle DVC I .

.

You don't see the popup for your PM then ?

[fatcatfan]

Stay away from USB capture devices as if they were the plague.

I was once the owner of both an ATI USB TV Tuner/Capture device and a Pinnacle PCTV USB. Both stank. The ATI had driver problems. I would get frame drops using vdub at 120x90x1FPS. yes one fps. I tried all sorts of things. I can't remember what my problem with the PCTV was, but it stank, too. I got rid of both rather soon after getting them.

So you definately do not want a USB capture device. It is possible with USB2.0 (which has higher bandwidth than firewire, I understand) that we might see improved USB capture devices. But they don't exist as yet.

[Ego_Shredder]

I used to capture to MPEG-1 (352 x 288, 24Bit Colour) using WinVCR v2.0 on an AMD K6-2 500MHz with my Hauppauge WinTV FM PCI and it just about managed it. File size was about 10MB per minute and the results were fair to crap. I could also capture uncompressed, but this used oceans of drive space and took a lifetime to encode to MPEG. I never tried M-JPEG on that machine, but I doubt it would have been able to.


My advice would be to upgrade obviously, but if you can't do this, I would capture straight to MPEG-1 in realtime and put up with the naff quality. If you can get a larger drive (80GB or better), I would capture uncompressed and encode to MPEG-1 using TMPGEnc............and then go on holiday for a year, while you wait for the video to finish encoding!


I currently use a Celeron 1.2GHz (overclocked to 1.4GHz), 512MB SDRAM, GeForce 2 MX-400, 80GB ATA-133 drive and capture direct to M-JPEG at 480 x 576, 24Bit colour, 44.1/16 uncompressed audio using AVI_IO program. This uses approximatley 100MB per minute of video and I then encode to MPEG-1 using TMPGEnc. Capturing uses about 20 to 50% of my CPU and encoding afterwards takes approx 2hrs for a 1hr file. The results look very good on my Napa Dav 311 VCD player on my TV, but I would love to be able to encode and burn X-VCD's to retain the full quality from my captures.


Cheers,

Ego 8)

[csaag]

Well, I've gone on the build my own route. Getting a barebones from Ebay with a 1600 XP and an Abit Kr7a board w 256 PC2100 DDR. I'll swap out my DVD-ROm, CD writer , floppy etc. Was able to do this for $175 (inc S&H and some assembly/testing)
Still have to decide on video card and wait for a good sale on a hard disk.
I figure I can either get a good video/capture card or a cheapo decent card (I'm not a gamer, although my kids play their games - 8yr old stuff)with a Dazzle brdige or canopus product (ADVC1394 since I don't have firewire?)

This will take a little while to let the finances keep pace, but if anyone has rec for a good capture/video card or opinions on what canopus/dazzle product to look into I'd appreciate it.
Thanks

[theDruid]

If you're after reasonable quality back-ups of VHS tapes, and nothing much more ambitious, I can recommend the Avermedia TV Capture98:

http://www.vcdhelp.com/capturecards.php?CaptureCardRead=Avermedia%20TVCapture%2098

You might be able to pick one up cheap on ebay etc.. (someone in the capture cards section of this site said they got one for about £25 or about $40 I think) and it's a PCI card, so no worries about USB etc..

I use mine to capture to PAL VCD spec with vDub and the HuffYUV codec, and the results are not too bad - roughly the same quality as the VHS source I'd say, which is about all you can ask. You also don't need acres of disc space (although you still need a fair bit more than that 2gig's you've got free at the moment I'm afraid!) Make sure you get a drive that's fast (i.e. 7200rpm) as well as big if you want to capture effectively to it, by-the-way.

I'm sure there are loads of other similar options (the BT878-based cards are generally quite well thought of as far as I can tell), but that's my 2 pennies worth.

Of course, if you think you might get into some more high-end capturing - from a digital source for example, a cheap & cheerful card like this won't get you very far.

cheers,

mcdruid.

PS. sorry to waffle on about this card, but I must also say that I've found AverMedia's customer support (here in the UK) exceptionally good - mine wasn't working for a while after I took it out of my old PC & when I e-mailed them, they sent me a little exe that fixed the problem straight away - none of this "your card's old... buy the new one" you come to expect.

[patrickm]

Well, I've gone on the build my own route. Getting a barebones from Ebay with a 1600 XP and an Abit Kr7a board w 256 PC2100 DDR. I'll swap out my DVD-ROm, CD writer , floppy etc. Was able to do this for $175 (inc S&H and some assembly/testing)
Still have to decide on video card and wait for a good sale on a hard disk.
I figure I can either get a good video/capture card or a cheapo decent card (I'm not a gamer, although my kids play their games - 8yr old stuff)with a Dazzle brdige or canopus product (ADVC1394 since I don't have firewire?)

This will take a little while to let the finances keep pace, but if anyone has rec for a good capture/video card or opinions on what canopus/dazzle product to look into I'd appreciate it.
Thanks

i would prob get a new hard drive, if only a 40-60 G one (which go on sale at best buy/ cirtcuit city for about $50-70 every other week)

also, instead of buying a cheapo winTV card to do AVI captures, go to www.compuvest.com and search for 'wonder' in the box. they have the ATI All-in-Wonder 128 Pro 16Mb AGP for only $37 (or $23 if you feel like soldering together your own breakout cables from a 9-pin DIN to s-video, composite, and audio....)

while it's not the top gaming card, the Rage Theater capture chip is literally identical to the one they ship on all capture cards since then, including the Radeon 9000, and the quality is real good. with a 900Mhz Athlon, you can do very good looking realtime MPEG-2 SVCD from a clean source, and still have the option for AVI as well. the drivers can be a bit tricky at times, but just read some of the posts on this forum that explain all the procedures step by step (i've done it a number of times as well as several other people). that way you can pick and choose when you want to get the absolute best product and encode it for 3 days or when to capture it in realtime and have it on a CD 30 minutes later.