Some questions about ATI AIW 7500

[Chris11115]

I've been thinking about getting a capture card for a while now. My first choice was the PV233, but having seen the All In Wonder Radeon 7500 card I've been thinking about purchasing that instead. Having just installed Windows XP Pro my original graphics card, an ATI Rage Fury Maxx, i've found that a lot of the features aren't supported on XP such as the DVD player, and it isn't exactly the best graphics card is it..so perhaps an All In Wonder is what i'm looking for.

I mainly wanted a capture card to capture VHS to mpeg1 then onto VCD, using as little space and time as possible, so ideally a card with realtime mpeg capture, does the AIW 7500 encode in realtime? Also, what is the quality of the mpeg like if capturing from the TV tuner or VCR?

Thanks

[kjmacke]

If you are looking for direct mpeg 1 or mpeg 2 caputure then go with the pv233. It does a much nicer job than the others in your price range.

[Digifreak]

If your motherboard uses a VIA chipset then I would avoid any ATI (god what a headache!)

[Chris11115]

Having looked around i've seen this other card which looks quite similar to the PV233, the AverMedia TV Studio (http://www.aver.com/products/tvstudio01.html)

This looks like it does the job i want and also doing MPEG2 realtime captures too. It's also a lot cheaper at £75 compared to the £100 i was quoted by ProVideo, and with retailers selling the product in the UK.

[Greg12]

remember that ATI uses a soft encoder that depends on ur CPU to encode. (CPU's are not good at doing this kind of operation in real time.)

I think the one u want uses a form of hardware encoding that reduces some of the work load


A true Direct MPEG has a special chipset like the one on the PV233