My mpeg2 thoughts so far....

[aiw9800proman]

Well ive now spent many many hours experimenting and surfing for info and heres my findings :

My aiw 9800 pro will capture high quality mpeg2 but only if the feed is of absolute top quality (which probably applies to all devices).

My Canopus vs Matrox argument has had biased results as I have only managed to talk Canopus owners and not one Matrox owner, although 2 dvstorm owners confessed to having big problems with some vhs feeds !

I really would like the Adobe video suite which keeps pointing me towards the rtx100 extreme because its such a competetive deal.

The Matrox white paper *does* clear up the argument between themselves and Canopus and it would appear that the Matrox hardware and software codecs are better. Although im still trying to understand the rgb vs yuv argument ?

And finally, if im to spend any more money I should really be investing in a TBC and maybe a vcr with more funtionality.

Did a test last night with the aiw9800pro and captured direct from the tv tuner with cropped mpeg and the result was fine
Which tells me that my composite vhs feed is the problem and not the card. Im sure Lord smurf will be pleased to hear that.

M

[lordsmurf]

Yeah, really good player and TBC (or other device) will fix video issues. This applies to any situation, whether you're just copying VHS to VHS or VHS to DVD.

Better equipment yields better quality. But unlike others out there, I don't believe that you need to dump in excess amount of money. A good S-VHS VCR, good capture card, and TBC can easily run under $1000 total. No need to spend $1000 per item (which can easily happen too). And if you know how to shop, sometimes you can grab all that for less than $500. Don't think of it as "wow $500!" or "wow $1000" but rather ... only $500-$1000 for your own video studio, which is essentially what you are creating.

Good luck. As one video professional recently told me, "working with digital video is akin to experimental witchcraft."