Quality Capture Card?........

[Diplomat]

Hello
I've authored DVDs, SVCDs, VCDs, ect for some time. Thanx to the best site on earth ( DVDRHELP.com ) Now I want to try my hand at this capturing stuff. First I need a a card but I have no idea what I should look for. I looking to spend no more than $150 but if the need be then I will. I've surfing this site and others but I've read some horror stories about installing capture card software and driver and its got me a little scared. I just looking for something to capture TV shows and convert my VHS to DVD-/+Rs. So if you want to give me your 2 cent that would be awsome. Thanx ahead a time for you input

[DVWannaB]

Ok, real-time mpeg 1 and 2 capture cards for $150 with great quality

This may take some trial and error on your part, as I am sure many others can agree that some cards work great for some and not for others. I know I have tried at least 6 or 7 and sent many of them back to the store.

The ADSTech Instant DVD USB 1.0 is good, not great and is better than the recently released version USB 2.0, which REALLY REALLY SUCKS!!! Software is ok, but I HATE MyDVD.

Hauppage WinTV PVR-250 gave me awesome MPEG-2 captures at high bitrates (3500 to 5000) with VBR and CBR encoding, then its drivers started acting up and screwing up my system, then it decided to stop capturing after 9 minutes. That was too bad, I really liked it, especially with a nice hack I got on the net. MPEG 1 (VCD) captures were so-so at best.

Intervideo WinDVR, does only CBR and is not ver configurable. I used to capture with high bitrate (6000), full frame (720x480) I-frames only, then re-encode in TMPG.

Those are some options. Also depending on what part of the world you are located, take a look at the Vidac VMagic (Europe).

As you can see there are good choices, but not great. If you want really solid to great try the Canopus products (above $150), you cant go wrong there. Look in the Capture card section of this website to get some more ideas and see some feedback from users.

Hope that helps.

[Karina]

Read reviews, read reviews some more and then read them again to make sure.

Don't worry too much about the occasional horror story if you are reasonably skilled with your system, a lot of the problems are solved easily.

In my opinion its best to go with a card people know, I'm sure that there are many fantastic exotic cards out there, but if you run into problems its nice to have people with the same card around to help out. Also if its common its more likely to be supported by the large number of software packages available.

Some of the cheaper cards actually do excellent captures, speaking personally from my experience with my Leadtek TV2000XP Deluxe I have had fantastic results when capturing from my VHS and DVD players. The main difference is the cheaper cards don't have any hardware encoding abilities (but they're produced in vastly greater numbers and therefore are dramatically less expensive) which means your cpu has to do the work. This isn't a major problem though if you have plenty of disk space, you can capture with a lossless or near lossless codec such as Huffyuv or Mjpeg(set to high quality), which are both very fast and produce an excellent quality video stream then re-encode to mpeg1/2 at whatever bitrate you desire.

As I've found capturing isn't all that straight forward when you get started, it takes a little bit of time, reading and trial and error before you'll figure out what software suits your needs and hardware, and how to make it work right for you.

Just have plenty of patience and you'll figure it out.

[Lorien]

This subject intrests me as well.I was going to post a new topic,but i saw this.

I've read reviews of cards ,i've browsed many pages etc.Still cant get a clear answer as to what i shoud be getting for myself.

I need a card to mainly capture VHS/TV stuff.

Let me see if i get this right : the ONLY difference between purchasing a cap card WITH hardware mpeg2 encoding,over one without, is that the the 1st one doeasnt require a powerfull cpu, right ?

If you do have a powerfull cpu, then can you do exactly the same capture with a card that doesnt have hardware encoder,yes?

I'm upgrading to P4 3.Ghx HT,512MB DDR3500,120GB ATA133 HD, so i'd like to know if i can get the job done with a tv tuner card,that loads the work to the cpu instead of doing it itself.

From the various reviews i've read, the 2 cards (with no hardware mpeg encoder)that seem to be most popular for this , AND are cheap,are:

Leadtek WinTV2000 XP deluxe
Hauppauge WinTV Theater

Many like the Leadtek,but i read many driver issues.
I havent read of any driver issues with the other one though.

If any1 can help out,it'd be really great

[Diplomat]

Thanx you guys for all the advice I'll definitely take it in to consideration when I purchase my card thanx again.

[Karina]

The onboard encoding hardware is pretty much the main difference between the cheap(without onboard encoder) and medium price range(with onboard encoder) cards, ussually they're based on very similar designs, decoder chips etc. Without a hardware encoder you can still use the same formats just your cpu does the encoding work instead of a chip on the card.

If you plan on making vcd's or dvd's a hardware compressor to mpeg1/2 is certainly handy although a 1GHz system will be adequate for TV, VCD and VHS capture resolution's (half dvd res) to go straight to mpeg1/2 without hardware encoding (a fast hard disk is also a big help, 8MB Cache types such Western Digital JB series are ideal) a CPU around 1800-2000MHz will make easy work of full resolution dvd capture but if you have a dvd drive there's no real need to do that as you can rip straight from the drive. If you plan on making mpeg4 type files, ussually you'll capture to Huffyuv or an MJPEG codec these are quite a bit faster but use a lot more disk space (think anything from 8-30gig per hour of movie depending on codec and settings) but capture at a substantially better quality.

If you buy a cheaper card, remember to check that it supports stereo audio.

To give you an idea of what a capture quality off a Leadtek TV2000XP Deluxe (A fairly cheap card) is like follow this link and there's some snapshots I've taken off the movie "Say It Isn' So" via my DVD player plugged into the card. They have been compressed to jpg so not as clean as the source, but pretty close.

http://epia.anduin.net/

[Lorien]

Tanks for the reply Karina So you got the Leadtek.Do you reccomend it ? Are there driver issues that will frustrate a user ? (WinXP system).

Any complaints about this card ?

By the way,nices captures ! Pretty good quality there! (and i've seen that movie...cant remember the title though ! )

[Karina]

The Leadtek TV2000XP Deluxe has been an absolute pleasure for me and I don't hesitate to recommend it,

I personally haven't had any driver issues but I use Win2k, there is a number of posts in the capture card user comments/reviews section regarding the driver issues and Windows XP, from what I can gather though most people find them pretty easy to solve and there's instructions for driver install under XP in that section also.

Make sure you use the current drivers and software, the ones that ship with the card are kind of crappy.

For me the best software combination has been to capture using iuVCR and the Huffyuv codec, then convert afterwards (generally to divx or xvid for me, my computer is also my entertainment system) but the Winfast PVR software works pretty well for MPEG1/2 capture, though the interface is a little basic for my tastes (I like to be able to tweak lots of settings.)

I personally have no complaints, I have found it to work very well and the quality of the captured video has been excellent.

For the record I actually chose the Leadtek card due to user feedback and reviews on this site.

[MrKGB]

I also have Leadtek TV2000XP Deluxe, running with win xp. I reinstalled the winfast drivers and btwincap drivers quite a few times, never had a problem.
Generally i like the card, but there are some small problems:
1. winfast pvr captures deinterlaced signal
2. sound doesn't work properly while using 3rd party software: one stereo channel is good, but second is SAP. This problem is specific to just few US cable channels, most of the channels work fine
3. i was not able to get stereo sound using btwincap drivers

[Barnabas]

Diplomat,

The Hauppauge PVR-250 is a great card for the money. They just released a new set of drivers, capturing application, and SW decoding on the 20th. Haven't played too much with the new drivers, but the one thing I noticed that's really nice is the sharpness default is now set to 7 rather than 2. It looked too soft at 2, and had to be tweaked with grahpedit.

Stay away from the ADS Instant DVD if you want to edit your captures or do SVCD's.

[txpharoah]

My 2 cents...

ATI ALL IN WONDER RADEON CARDS.

The 7500/8500 if you have a budget. $100-$175
The 9700/9800 if price is no object. $200-$400
The 7000/7200 from eBay if looking for bargain. $50-100