Should I buy a Dazzle DVC II, or keep what I have?

[bryanjohnfields]

I am wanting to create VCD’s XVCD’s, SVCD’s, and soon DVD’s. I currently have a Hauppauge WinTV PCI and I’m considering the Dazzle because it has real-time hardware Compression. I also have ATI TV Wonder USB, I can put the two cards on Ebay and maybe get $100 out of them. My Dazzle card will then cost roughly $150.

My question is would I be better off Spending $150 on a Dazzle DVCII or buy anther Hard Drive and continue to capture and compress?

[species8472]

I also want to know this answer. I have had win tv, ati all in wonder and now a PCTV Pro card. The PCTV is doing a fine job, but I tire of doing the whole capture high quality to avi and then encode to mpg with TMPGenc. It would be very nice to just capture with quality using hardware compression and then basically just creating a svcd or soon a dvd. Does anyone have experience doing this??? Please please.

[SHS]

bryanjohnfields and species8472 you have 2 options Dazzle DVC II or Hauppauge WinTV-PVR both have real-time hardware compression and both can do DVD quality MPEG2 8MBit/sec. Yup better off with real-time hardware if plan on going to DVD-R or RW disk.
All you need is DVD burn programs.

[tww1]

Well i have both Win and the dazzle and doing it with the Win card and frameing it is much better quility then the dazzle if someone want to buy the dazzle i will sell it. It may be faster to use the dazzle but the quility you lose not worth the extra money.

[D_Knife]

tww1,
I only have the DVC II, but I downloaded some sample caps from the Win PVR and they looked crap compared to my DVC.
I played them on both Win MP 6.4 and my HW+, on the HW+ the PVR looked quite good, but I still feel the DVC gave a better picture. This is a biased estimate of course as I only own the DVC.

bryanjohnfields and species8472,
With the DVC 2,I can cap and burn. Cap using either VCD or SVCD, both look and burn great (Nero 5). I can play them with my HW+, Pioneer 535 and Palsonic 3000. I can also play the VCD in my parents Toshiba SD1200 (it doesn't support SVCD) mail me if you want more info.

[SHS]

D_Knife no wonder why it look bad your using WMP 6.4 you should update to 7.1 then it look lot better

[ssv]

I bought DVC II and i was not happy with its software and support. I returned it and got WinTVPVR .
I like winTV PVR.

[themamboman]

I almost got the WinTVPVR because of the cost difference, but then I saw some SVCD compliant captures made with a Dazzle DVC2 and was stunned. A guy named Spawn has put them up on his ftp site:

ftp://spawn.dnsalias.com
login: svcd
pw: svcd

Under the testclips directory. He captured these with the standard SVCD template in PAL format.

When I capture from DirecTV, I generally cap with the DVD profile and use DVD2avi and TMPGEnc with my own, custom svcd template. Outstanding quality.

I do not use the built-in software bundle. I use TWNH as the capture and scheduling front end. I also use Womble MPEG2VCR for editing.

TheMamboMan

[gminnick]

I am also trying to decide between the Dazzle DVCII and the WinTV PVR. The reviews I have read of the two seem to put the Dazzle ahead, but then I get opinions here where someone has worked with both and like the WinTV PVR. I have a question. If you have the Dazzle DVCII and a TV Tuner only card, can you capture from TV and use the Dazzle to do the compressing?
It seems either card would work out great, but the review on this site did not favor it too much.

All I really want to do is record TV shows from a TiVo or VCR and put them on CD, either in VCD or SVCD. I just need to find out if TV/VCR/Tivo quality output is good enough for SVCD or no diff than VCD.

[RedHat]

Ok, this topic is a little old now, but for those of you who would like to know more about the Dazzle DVCII, please visit our forum below. BTW, Spawn is a part of this forum as well and is very informative I might add.

http://www.stop.at/dazzle2

[BKL]

I have not used the DVC II, but I do have the WinTV PVR. I am most dissatisfied with the quality of the WinTV PVR MPEG2 output, even using the new software w/ a 12Mbps bitrate! With fast motion, I still see blocky patterns. I have been sending my video signal (RCA) into my Sony D8 camcorder and then use Firewire to bring it straight into my computer and processing with ULead VideoStudio 5 DVD with pretty good results. I am just now starting to look at TMPGenc as I only discovered this site about a week ago! Even with a 1.4GHz Tbird, this can take awhile! I bought the PVR hoping to go realtime, and am severely disappointed.