Need advice for buying a new capture card here...

[dark_myuutwo]

Hi!
My question is:

Are there any really good Windows XP-compatible video capture cards that can:

1) Capture at highest DVD video quality rate (9.8Mbps) without frame dropping
2) Can capture via both or either the analog RCA yellow cable and S-VIDEO?

If so, what are the best brands for PC computers that meet my requirements above, and are they internal or external? (I'm looking for internal ones, preferrably)

Also, if it affects anything, I live in Canada, and as well I'd like to know which big name stores I can get such video capture cards at, please and thanks!

[SatStorm]

A good choice in your case could be a Matrox card. There are top quality, but a bit pricey.

Then comes ATI, and then a DV convertor like Canopus 50

[trueg]

I am in Canada as well and I purchased a Pinnacle Studio AV/DV PCI card today for $150 at Best Buy and it's pretty cool. Editing in MPEG2 isn't the best, so I capture in Lossless HuffyUV compression, edit and then output to MPEG2. It's an internal PCI card with s-video & composite analog inputs/outputs. It also has Firewire which I needed anyway.
I have been capturing at 720x480 without a single dropped frame, which is about as good as you can get. I have a Celeron 1.4Ghz system with WinXP & 512MB of SDRAM.

[glockjs]

all in wonder 9800 pro is just under $270 at newegg right now, why not pick up an awesome cap card plus a killer vid card all at the same time

[mats.hogberg]

Huappage PVR250 (or 350) - Excellent if you just want mpg (no AVI capture). Hardware encoder, so takes absolutely 0 system resources.

/Mats

[soloredd]

Can you use the Hauppauge PVR250 in a PIP mode? For example, I want to surf the net but also watch TV, can I put the TV signal into a little window in the corner of my screen?

[mats.hogberg]

Of course! That's what I do all the time. Fully resizeble from stamp size to full screen. However, in this mode it takes some resources, since it's decoding the mpeg for the display. Another small annoyance is that it's a 2-3 sec delay in the A/V compared to an ordinary TV showing the same channel. I guess PVR is buffering a few secs before starting to display it. But the time shift feature is cool - you can pause a "live" TV show and come back after a while and continue watching without missing a single moment.

/Mats