What capture card should i buy?

[haggen]

Hi, ive already red all Capture Cards section (revies etc etc) but i cant still make a choice on what card should i buy.

What i need in a card is to make VCD and SVCD from VHS (mostly) in the highest quality possible. Im willing to pay around 200-230 dollars for a new card.

What you recommend??

i have a:

P4, 1.3 ghz, 500+ ram, 40gigs HD 7200 rpm.

P.S I have 2 days to decide, please help. I had in mind SNAZZI III DVD Creator.

[Bruce Simpson]

It's been my experience that most of the BT8x8 cards are pretty similar in terms of their hardware performance and ultimately the software can be a deciding factor.

If you want "ultimate" MPEG quality then capturing with a "dumb" card using a lossless codec then doing non-realtime with something like TMPGenc is probably your best bet.

However, I've been extremely impressed with the MPEG-2 performance of the Hauppauge PVR-250.

with an average bitrate of 1600 and a peak bitrate of 2250, the PVR-250's realtime MPEG-2 encoder produces results that are very close to TMPGenc -- but it does it on the fly (which means in about one quarter the time on my P4/1.8GHz system).

The downsides of the PVR-250 are however, that you can't easily do things such as border cropping, filtering, luminance/chroma adjustments, etc without re-encoding -- and that's going to hurt the picture quality immensely.

For "best quality" footage I use a Pinnacle PCTVPro with the Huffyuv codec to create an intermediate (and highly editiable) AVI file. I apply any necessary filters, effects and adjustments to this file then run it through TMPGenc at whatever bitrate I want.

The results are SVCDs which are near-DVD-like in quality yet still allow me 45-50 minutes per 700MB CDR.

The PVR-250 comes into its own when you just want to catch a TV broadcast, edit out the ads then burn it to CDR without doing any other work on it.

Horses for courses I guess.

As well as the reivews on this site you might want to take a look at the reviews I've done on the PCTV and PVR-250 at http://aardvark.co.nz/pvr/

[Bondiablo]

If you want the best quality with the least hassle go with the Canopus ADVC-100. It's not a capture card but a seperate box that converts the analog signal to DV and sends it to your computer through a firewire card. Then convert the DV AVI files to MPEG with TMPGEnc. Though if you're going to be capturing long tapes you may want to add a 2nd hard drive, DV AVIs are about 12GB per hour.

Canopus ADVC-100 $250
FireWire Card $15-$20
TMPGEnc Free for MPEG1 or $48 for the Plus version if you need MPEG2