DVC II-alike card that can capture AVI ???

[iparout]

Hi there,
I'm searching for a capture card that's as good and reliable as Dazzle DVC II and has also the ability to capture AVI (uncompressed, Huffy and MJPEG). Any recommendations ?

[Dman65]

I am not familiar with any cards that capture hardware MPEG and non-compressed formats. But, you should be able to pick up a new BT8x8 card for under $50 or a used one on E-Bay for considerably less and use that with a DVC II and have both worlds. Just make sure to put them on seperate IRQs when you install them.

[iparout]

you are wrong Dman. There are lots of cards that capture both MPEG and AVI e.g. ATI AIW Radeon, Hauppage win TV PVR, ASUS V7700 e.t.c All I want to know is which of them are as good and reliable at capturing as DVC II. Any help ?

[Accoleon]

If you're talking about hardware capture, there aren't really many choices...
The DVC II does hardware Mpeg-1 and Mpeg-2 capture, while most other cards actually use proprietary software codecs to capture....eg, ATI AIW can capture Mpeg-1, Mpeg-2, Uncompressed, because it uses it's own software codec, same goes for Matrox's G450 eTV
Moreover, it's difficult to find a card (if not impossible) which does hardwasre mpeg-1, mpeg-2, mjpeg and uncompressed all in one...it's usually one or the other, so you can't get all of them in one card usually.

PS: Hauppage WinTV PVR is hardware mpeg-1 and 2, as for uncompressed i'm not too sure.

I'm personally using a Matrox Marvel G400-TV card, on hardware MJPEG for that matter. It does uncompressed capture too, so it's good just for me.

And also to clear things up, AVI capture doesn't really mean anything. It's only a file container format, how big the sizes of th files or the attributes will have to depend on the codec used, bitrate, eg.