Opinions please, on Capture cards.

[VTEC9000]

Ive had my AIW RADEON 32MB for quite long now and im in need of a new graphics card as i cant play CC generals at a decent FPS. The only problem is, i cant afford to buy the AIW 9700.

I want a solution where i could buy a midrange graphics card like the RADEON 9500 and also a CAPTURE CARD, that way i dont have to keep ugrading to a new AIW all the time, if u know what i mean.

I being doing capturing for a long time and im quite impressed with AIWs quality captures. For the pros out there can u recommend me a good card prefferably with a tv tuner. I want to spend about £150-£200 and it has to be better than the AIW in caputer qaulity.

[VTEC9000]

oh, and dont tell me to goto the capture cards sections.

I want the pros opinion on this.

[VTEC9000]

please, someone help me.

Ok shall i get the Canopus ADVC-100 or the Vidac Vmagic.

[txpharoah]

For a graphics card with a tv tuner and can capture, you'll find nothing better than ATI AIW. If you're trying to outdo the capture quality of ATI, you'll need to jump into the pro arena. The MATROX RTX100 is excellent.

I suggest saving up longer and reselling the old card on eBay when done to recoup some of the expenses.

[VTEC9000]

u dont understand what im trying to say.

i dont want to keep ugrading to an AIW radeo. I want to buy a graphics card and a capture card seperately. Like an ATI radeon 9500+Canopus ADVC-100. That way when the graphics card becomes useless for future games, i only have to upgrade the graphics card and not both, u know what i mean now. Basically, i just want experienced peoples opinion on which is the best capture card to buy and it has to have better capture quality than the AIW.

If you own a Canopus ADVC and an AIW Radeon, please tell me which has better capture quality and how much do they differ.

[txpharoah]

I honestly think its a waste to upgrade a system for games only, but I'll try to answer as best as I can anyway. I'll just sound my age again: computers are tools, not toys.

The Matrox RTX100 card is not a graphics card. It's a video card only, about $1K. It is similar to the ATI AIW card, but the RTX is much better. You asked for the best. This is one of them.

The ATI AIW card does better and has more functions that the low-end Canopus cards. I'm sure I'll hear arguments, but the Canipus is just simply a DV AVI card, nothing that great.

Do what you want, but my professional opinion is that you're making a mistake by making video games the priority over video, because replacing the AIW card with some DV device will not be that great. You're stepping down, not up. At least for video. Maybe the games are stepping up.

Decide: Which is more important? If you're a gamer, then maybe video quality doesn't matter as much as the newest video game.

[MrKGB]

VTEC9000,

I also don't like the idea of combined video - capture card.
AFAIK most of the cards nowdays are built using the BT8x8 chipset.
The rest of them are eithter old junk or semi-professional cards which cost a lot.
So you should decide whether you want BT8x8 or semi-professional card.
IMO all BT8x8 cards are about the same, only software is different.
But you can always use VDUb or VirtualVCR if card's sotware is not good.
These cards are cheap and good for most users.
I used 2 BT878 based cards: AverMedia TV/FM and WinFast TV2000, both of them cost about $50, have stereo sound and FM and I like both of them.
I also used AIW 7500 for couple of days and I coudn't see that it is any better than the cards above.
Most of the expensive cards do hardware MPEG conversion which IMO is not a great idea because I think it is much better to capture into AVI using some lossless (or almost lossless) codec, filter out all the noise and
only after this encode MPEG2. This can be done using the cheapest card

If your old card is PCI, you can just keep it and buy a new AGP video card .

[VTEC9000]

MrKJB goot idea.

I think i'll use my old ati tv wonder and buy a new graphics card for now and later replace the ati wonder with Vdac Vmagic or Dazzle DVC 2.

[broadway]

MrKGB,

I also have an AVerMedia Stereo TV capture card.

The problem I am having is that when I capture to AVI, I exceed the 4GB limit for file size. I have Windows ME.

Is there anything I can do short of going to Windows2000? What software are you using for your video capture?

I am capturing about 15 minutes of video at a time.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

[MrKGB]

broadway,
Upgrade to XP Home, it is only $85 for OEM version.
You can also try to capture using DIVX codec @ 8000 kbps, the quality will be ok, and you will be able to fit about 1 hour of video.
Actually AFAIR vdub has some way of splitting files into 2 GB segments.