Your Opinons on USB Capture? Please help.

[DigitallyFascinated]

Hi guys,

I am considering ordering a USB capture device to import my home videos from camera onto the PC to edit. Has anyone else here used a USB capture device, and if so, would you kindly offer any feedback on quality, etc?

I am planning on going with the Pinnacle Linx package. Here is a link to the USB capture device I am considering.


Hope someone can help, as I don't want to blindly buy something that isn't going to work decently for me...

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?sku=P121-4002

I guess to be specific and answer what will probably be your biggest question: I plan to use it to capture videos from my camcorder, and then perhaps burn VCD's.

Thanks a million.

[kitty]

It might create mediocre to ok VCDs but don't expect DVD quality.

[Redeye07]

I originally started with a Dazzle DVC80 USB capture device (similar to the Pinnacle Linx.) I don't know anything about Pinnacle but I'll tell you about the Dazzle.

I was not happy with it at all. I wanted to make backups of old VHS tapes. It dropped more frames than it captured and I spent weeks installing patches and updating drivers trying to get it to work right. I took it back to the store.

I bought a Canopus ADVC100 which cost a lot more but was worth it because I have had no problems with it at all. I think firewire is better than USB.

Check out the Capture Cards listing and see what people are saying.

[jameshgross]

Hello,

I have been using the Haupp-auge WinTV-PVR USB. I am very pleased with the quality of the captures. Hauppauge supplies an editor and vcd converter along with the WinTV 2K software. All work well. My system is a Dell latitude C600.

Hope this info helps.

[Jester700]

For VCD the Hauppauge is the best choice for realtime MPEG capture in USB. I had one & returned it because I do mostly DVD, and it wouldn't capture audio natively at 48k. So captures had to go through a conversion, slowing down the authoring process. Since speed is the whole point of realtime capture, it wasn't what I had in mind.

[lpn1160]

I started out also with a wintv2000 usb and if your're just gona do vcds it's fine, however to capture directly to vcd mpeg1 is not worth it. what i did was capture @ mpeg2 6mbps, then convert down to vcd. the results i had were frightfully good. an extra step or 2 but quality wise was well worth the extra time