Once again.....What card to buy?

[Causality]

I'm new to all this. I'm building a new system. I've read the capture card list and searched the forums here at length and apart from some of the $300+ cards the reviews conflict with each other to the point I can't figure out whether a particular capture device is junk or the best. I'll use a T-bird 1.4 . I'm going to use a GeForce2 Pro or maybe a Geforce3 so an All-In-Wonder Radeon (which everyone rates highly) is a waste of money. I'm on DSS so a TV tuner is also useless except for channel 3. I'll use a 60 GB ATA100 7200rpm hard drive and should have no problem keeping 30 gigs free for temp storage of video files. I've downloaded TMPGENc and read several guides on it. I would like to use the s-video connection from my DSS receiver to make high quality SVCD's from pay-per-views. I don't want to pay for a hardware MPEG2 encoder so it seems uncompressed (AVI) is my only option. Most people seem to not like the proprietary software that comes with most cards and use vdub so that doesn't seem to be factor in choosing a card either. So my question is: what capture/tv card do you all recommend? It seems what I need is a card that works with vdub and delivers high quality uncompressed video. I know this question has been asked a hundred times but a dialog will help as opposed to closed threads read later.

Thanks

[G COURY]

I too am new to this, but I thought I would give my two cents worth.... You may want to call ATI directly and talk with their sales people. You may want to look at the ATI TV wonder. I think it has S-Video input to connect to your DSS system. It also can capture in MPEG 1 and 2 with the latest software from ATI. Once you capture in MPEG, I believe that you won't have to go through the long encoding process. .... Good Luck.

[Causality]

G COURY, thanks for the reply. I just spent 45 minutes combing ATI's site for reference to MPEG2 support with the TV Wonder and I can't find "hide nor hair". And they obviously don't invite phone calls. How do I communicate with someone there to confirm the MPEG2 thing. Or do you have one that's doing it? Other threads here are talking about work arounds. Maybe they don't know about the latest download. Got a link?
Any help is greatly appreciated.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Causality on 2001-08-05 20:51:17 ]</font>

[jpb1977]

CONSIDER IT CONFIRMED! I have an ATI TV Wonder and the mpeg2 button is staring me straight into the face! Now, here is the confusing part. My mpeg2 max width is 240, but I've seen hacks that get it to 480, but no necessarily for the TV Wonder version of 7.1 - someone else is going to have to help us on this, and with instructions please!

jpb

[Anonymous65]

I'm looking for a capture cards as well, and this is what I have found:

Cheap $50 TV tuner cards - most are based on the BT8xx chip, that will do overlay mode (needed by many capture programs like Ulead Videostudio) ONLY in x240 mode, meaning it will only do single fields, NOT both fields. This means that you cannot capture anything more than 640x240 (NTSC) in this mode (half a frame). However, if you use a capture program where you can use Preview mode, or turn off overlay/preview (like Vdub) you can capture up to 640x480 pixels. Also, to be able to capture at high resolutions, you need like a P3/1GHz with a very fast hard drive. (you can use Picvideo to compress and save space, but you still need massive CPU power). These cards then works good for 320x240 (352x240) captures with all capture programs. You can make VCD's nicely with these cards. If you want to make SVCD's or miniDVD's, you have to use certain software and massive CPU power and hard drive space. So, it's not a good option for SVCD's.

ATI All in Wonder and Matrox video cards - these cards have direct link to the video card (same card), so there is no problem to display both fields in overlay mode. No CPU power and PCI/AGP buss power is used to display your captured video. The AGP/PCI buss can use all capacity to record the video stream, 720x480 on a medium fast PC. You will have no isses like overlay/preview mode and bottlenecks because of the overlay mode when recording both fields. I'm getting an ATI All in Wonder 128 32MB next week for making VCD's and SVCD's. I hope this will work out.

Hardware capture and encoder cards - like the DC10+ with motion jpeg capture. You can do 640x480 capture with a slow PC, and then convert it to whatever end format you want. You have to use the capture software that came with the card, and in most cases you cannot use regular capture programs like Vdub and Wincap32. You're stuck with what the manufacturer of the card gives you.

So, my conclusion is to get the All in Wonder (or Matrox G400 TV) for making VCD's and SVCD's. This card can record AVI with any capture program and record mpeg-1 and mpeg-2 real-time with a fast PC. It will give you the maximum of options to record video on the PC. And lastly, you can get the ATI AIW 128 (Pro) for just over $100 if you shop around.

SK

[Anonymous65]

Oh, I might say a few words about USB devices also.

All USB video devices (except the ones with hardware mpeg encoder like Dazzle) has a major limitation, the USB bus. It is impossible to capture uncompressed video via the UBS bus. So, all the UBS capture devices use proprietary compression between the usb device and the capture program. You can even select uncompressed 24 bit video in the capture program, and record with this huge bit stream, but you will only get a small tricke via the USB bus. That is why the video looks so bad even if you select uncompressed AVI in your capture program. In reality, the video bitrate have already been compressed several hundred times over the USB bus!

Sk

[googlioboy]

Before you buy anything, check out the Pyro Platinum card, from ADS Technologies. It won't let you do auto MPEG 1 or 2 capture, but it's a great firewire (IEEE-1394) capture card for the money. I bought it for 279 bucks from the Electronic Mailbox (www.videoguys.com). It came bundled with Premiere 6.0 and some other programs that will enhance your video-making experience. If you decide to go the auto MPEG 1 or 2 capture route, after you get a card, check out the Power VCRII program, from CyberLink Industries (the website is http://www.gocyberlink.com). This program will not only let you do the MPEG 1 and MPEG 2 capture on the fly, but will let you use your computer like a TiVO unit, recording shows from your cable box (and DSS, I suppose)on to your hard drive. I have the program, but have not done anything with it yet (I bought it to use with my Pioneer DVD-R A03 drive, which I should receive today). I'll post a thread about how the drive works with the program at a later date.

[Beavis]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-08-05 22:35:53, skittelsen wrote:

Cheap $50 TV tuner cards -
....Also, to be able to capture at high resolutions, you need like a P3/1GHz with a very fast hard drive. (you can use Picvideo to compress and save space, but you still need massive CPU power). These cards then works good for 320x240 (352x240) captures with all capture programs. You can make VCD's nicely with these cards. If you want to make SVCD's or miniDVD's, you have to use certain software and massive CPU power and hard drive space. So, it's not a good option for SVCD's.

</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

This is incorrect. I've made excellent looking SVCD's captured at full vertical resolution using a TV tuner card and and VirtualDUB on a 400 Mhz PC.

[Anonymous65]

However, as a warning, with my 1 GHz P3 and ATA100 40 gig hard drive, I can just do 480x480 without dropping frames. I don't think it is the standard that a 400 MHz PC can do 480x480 @30 frames without dropping frames. That is my expersience, so be warned.

SK

[rakuraku]

I have one of those $15 cybermail av cards
& can capture 640x480 @ 30fps on my
P3 750, and my udma-33 fragmented drive.

[Anonymous65]

I use the same Cybermail card. I can do 640x480 using Vidcap32 in 4:2:2 mode with CPU load at 100% and dropping some frames, but with virtualdub in 24 bit mode and Picvideo at 18 setting I can barely do 480x480 captures. I might have a poor motherboard, but it's an Aopen MX3S with 256MB PC133 ram, P3/1GHz 133MHz FSB and running ATA100 hard drive. In my view, that is a very powerful PC.

SK

[rakuraku]

damn that reply was fast .

I use AV_IO and not virtualdub.....Virtualdub performance seems to be horrible for me for some reason and often bluescreens forcing me to restart.

Hmmm, I need to get around to figuring out why this happens when I try to use VirtualDub one of these days!

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: rakuraku on 2001-08-08 04:25:02 ]</font>

[the3rdlevel]

has anyone gotten that cybermail card working under win2k pro? i have been unable to get mine to work and i dont want to install win98

[rakuraku]

ER, damn double post
;_;


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: rakuraku on 2001-08-08 05:30:55 ]</font>

[rakuraku]

.....

I got my cybermail av working in win2k with the drivers posted on the compgeeks site.

The only videomodes to choose from though are rgb 24 or 16.

The performance is crap for me though, at 320x240 with audio I drop about 90 out of 100 frames using AV_IO

With no audio I dont drop any frames... maybe its related to my soundcard, but it works fine in win98....but my soundcard does not have win2k drivers (stupid creative labs) but win2k installed some generic drivers for the soundcard (its ESS18** based card)

Anyways, even with no dropped frames, for some reason the video plays back several times the normal speed of what its supposed to.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: rakuraku on 2001-08-08 05:32:50 ]</font>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: rakuraku on 2001-08-08 05:35:10 ]</font>