Need recomendation on TV card

[whiskey29]

Help, I'm confused. I have read most of the user comments list of capture cards and with so many respond with 50-50 attitude on each card, I can't decide one for my self.

For now, I'm running Windows XP on AMD XP 1600 with 512 MB DDR with 7200 Rpm Harddrive.

The things that I'll do most or want with the card is :

1. Record TV show in STEREO (I prefer auto recording)and make it into VCD or maybe save into mpeg2.
2. Record some of my vhs video into VCD.
3. may be has both NTSC and PAL compatibility and definetly has composite input.

The thing is I don't want to spend over $60. I understand that most of those TV Tuner says realtime compression.

Quetions :

1. When it says realtime, is that hardware or software compression ?

2. Will my system have enough processing power to capture and use the software compression in realtime to MPEG with no drop frames since I don't want to record gigabytes of movie and then later convert them into VCD for hours.

3. I've been looking into hauppage dbx FM PCI TV tunner but it cost about $90. Any similar card that has great capability but affordable for me?

Thank you Thank you and Thank you very much in advance for those who replied.

[FredThompson]

Not possible for $60.

If you must have both NTSC and PAL you'll have to buy a card not made for the North American market. Uh...that's assuming you mean a PAL vairant as used in Europe and not those of Brazil and whoever else it is in South America that uses one. Sometimes those are compatible with NA cards.

MPEG compression takes many forms. It's lossy and most realtime compression stinks unless you have pro equipment. All cheap cards have no hardware compression. THey may have some DEcompression in hardware but that's very different.

CPU speed isn't the only issue you should address. File system, size, and throughput are important.

Composite input is lousy for digitizing. Composite means more than one aspect of the video signal is combined on one wire. If you use composite, you're asking the card to do more with a lower quality signal than if you were giving it S-video or another form of component video.

[whiskey29]

First of all, thanks Fred for the answer.

About the thruoutput, I edit movvie from DV alot and I have never had even 1 dropped frame so I guess I'll be alright with that.

I guess $200 is too expensive for now.

Then i have to do it the dirty way right ?

Capture the shows using virtualdub using that hyuv codec and ended with gigs of data for 30 minutes shows and later I have to convert it my self using tmpgenc correct ? It'll be hours of converting though....

Alright the way is decided, no realtime compression coz the quality sucks.

The questions are :
1. Is any brand of card matters ? I saw that I/O something card only for $40, and hauppage one twice as much while ATI TV and studio PCTV pro fell in the middle. Will the captured quality differs ?

2. Any sugesstions since I read lot's of problem people hav when they tried to use virtualdub to capture to standard VCD resolution.

Thank you.

[jen_jen]

You dont want the pctv pro, i have that card, i dont know about the others, before you think about buying a pinnacle studio pctv i would go to there website www.pinnaclesys.com and click on support and go check out there forums, you will get a good idea of how they help there customers. The card its self is ok, despite alot of problems i had with it when i bought a new cpu, but the studio software that comes with it is horrible, it has only miroxl and pinnacleRTMpeg that you can use for compression, and they are both horribe, i really dont know why they put that software with it. I just talked to someone yesterday from the pinnacle forums, and this is what he had to say "I will tell you somethinfg that I did find out though that was very interesting. Comp USA sells a cheap TV tuner card from a company called I/o magic this tv tuner was only $39.99 and it came with a program called power VCR that let you use your PC as a vcr. It also had WDM drivers for the tuner / capture. card. The Pinnacle PCTV does not have WDM drivers Well to my suprise when I got this cheap I/o magic tv tuner card home and opened the box it is a Pinnacle tv tuner card! all the chips on it were the same as my PCTV Pro except it didnt have the s-video in and composite in, or the FM tuner. Its a pinnacle PCTV in generic packaging! but on the I/O magic website they have WDM drivers for it. p.s. i did find out that the PCTV vision program for watching tv won't work with the WDM drivers."
I hope that might help a little bit.

[whiskey29]

Thanks for the reply Jen.

I did saw that I/O magic card at a local compusa. However lacking of composite input really demotivates me from that card.
Is I/O Magic card good ? I mean quality wise, problem wise, and do you happen to know if it is compatible to capture at ntsc vcd ersolution wih virtualdub ?

Thanks