OK! Flushed ATI TV Wonder, Looking at WIN TV GO.

[Barky]

Running Compaq presario 900 Athlon, 256mb ram, "via" chipset, NVIDIA Vanta Agp card, Win ME.

I gave the free ATI TV Wonder card 1 try at installing and running correctly, using tips from every source I could find, ran into the usual ATI problems, flushed it.

I am now looking at a WIN TV Go pci card. Any advice?

[fakesky]

Well it works well, but I never really got into the avi capturing mess
so it got shelftime pretty fast..

WINTV PVR is my card of choice right now, works like a charm
and I dont have to worry about framedrops or diskspace..

but if u dont wanna pay 2-300 bucks then wintv go is a good choice

[buzz10]

I'm using a WinTV capture card every day to capture Seinfeld and Star Trek TNG episodes. I think it is the Model 401 with an FM radio in it also (which I never use). I'm using Windows XP and have captured over 50 episodes so far with very little problem. I capture in 352 X 240 resolution using VirtualDub, then compress them to MPG with TMPGenc. If you are looking to do DVD resolution captures, (720x480) then I don't think this card can go that high, but mine turn out to look darn close to a DVD even at 352x240 anyway. For the money, you can't beat this card.

[thegig]

You might want to relook at the spec for WinTV Go, I believe you cannot cap in stereo. VDub will cap saying stereo, but the card is mono only, so if you look at the audio in an audio editor it just copies the same info to both sides. I had one and went with the AverTV Stereo. It's about the same price, it has both VFW and WDM drivers. If you use the WDM drivers, you can cap directly to MPEG2/MPEG1 and pause live tv. Problem with the WDM setup is you cannot cap at "strange" resolutions. What I mean by that is 352X480. They do not support selection of resolutions independat of each other only the predefined ones. I tried using a wrapper and using VDub, but it still did not work. So I use the VFW driver, kind of a bummer cause I would have liked to keep the cap to MPEG2 for low quality vids.

[TheInformer]

The WinTV-GO card is a mono card - no stereo here! I got rid of mine and bought a WinTV PCI-FM card (model 401) to do my captures.

If stereo isn't important, then the GO card will work well for you.

[Plant_Guy]

Hello,

I also purchased the AverTV stereo card b/c of the stereo issue. I also, however, ran into the VDub problem, but I must point out that by using PowerVCR II and stinky's registry hack program, I have been able to cap at 480x480. I have never been able to get virutaldub to work, though

TomG. - aka Plant_Guy

[simonko]

Did you get the generic capture drivers for the ATI TV Wonder Card?
(Do not use the provided capture drivers from ATI)

You can download it at Sorce Forge and there was a link to it in these forums. I dont remember where. It allows you to capture at DVD resolution.

Use "Virtual Dub' to capture and "Tmpgenc" to encode the Mpeg movie.


-------------
So dont shelf that card yet 8) it may be better than the one you are about to buy!

[thegig]

Plant_Guy, you can get the AVERTV to work with VDUB if you use the VFW drivers. If you were interested. That's what I did because I like having the latitude of how I can capture and what to capture to. Plus I like the VDUB filters and the Timers/Scheduler.

Barky, as far as WinTV Go, I liked it for converting home movies and the such. But now I'm in the phase of backing up my vhs stuff to DVD, so I need the stereo option.

[Plant_Guy]

These drivers are installable for XP? How do you install them? Thanks for the info.

TomG. - aka Plant_Guy

[thegig]

I'm not sure if Aver supplies a VFW driver for XP you might want to email them, of course their support sucks - I emailed them several times and NEVER received a response. I didn't realize you had XP. Did you try any of the drivers from

http://faq.arstechnica.com/subcat.php?i=95

They have links to several places/different drivers.

This seems to be the driver of choice
http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/index.html

This is of course a WDM driver, I had limited success n Win98se - you might have better success.

Hope that helps any!