I need a good capture card

[life02]

Hey all,
I'm looking for a good video capture card so i can get some vhs tapes onto vcd and dvd but am wondering what card is the best deal. I'm hoping to spend under $200. I am running XP HOME on a Athlon XP 2100+ w 1GB ram and 120GB of memory and a GeForce 4 TI 4400.

Thanx
Jon

[life02]

btw I already have all the software from my old cpu which had an ATI RAIDEON 64M DDR VIVO, but I sold it so i could get a new one. I know enough about conversion but I just need a high quality capture card or tower or whatever else they have. The local best buy seems to just have low end cards and camcorder capture cards. I rather not use S-video b/c my vcr doesn't support it and I don't want to have to buy another s-video to rca cable adapter like I use on my geforce 4. And finally i need a PCI option if I have to use a card that has to be inserted in my cpu b/c my agp slot is filled with the geforce 4.

thanx again
Jon

[tjdmobile]

I have a pinnacle cap card, an ATI AIW Radeon DDR32, and a WinTV -pvr250.

All things considered, I prefer my ATI overall for quality and features. If you don't want to give up your AGP card, I guess you could get the WinTV.

[tonyk]

If you want something inexpensive, you can try one of the tv cards - I have the I/O Magic PVR card, purchased at CompUSA for $40, and I've used it for capturing VHS. Has an SVideo, Composite and cable antenna connection, with audio captured through the soundcard.

I use the included PowerVCRII software, which is fine for VHS captures, and I've also changed to the btwin drivers available at sourceforge, which allows the card to capture with VDub.

Normally I capture with high rate MPEG2, then use TMPGEnc to reduce the size of the file to fit on a CDR. With your computer specs, the card should work fine.

I also own a Dazzle DVCII (which cost $200 more than the tv card), but I find I use the tv card more for capturing VHS tapes than the Dazzle - it's just a lot easier.

Since you also have WinXP - there have been some problems installing the I/O Magic PVR card in WinXP, but check the support forum at IOMagic for installation help. I run Win98 and the card works fine.

Cheers, --TonyK

[ViperXT]

If you have a big HD and a speedy CPU(like you do) you will probably find a TV card is a good option. It can capture with good quality and the software encoding is generally better than a hardware encoder.

[life02]

thanx everyone for the quick replies!

[life02]

I was also wondering if there are any good USB capture cards. I was looking around and I didn't see too many of them but I would like to be able to capture dvd quality and the one's that had specs only captured vcd quality.

thanx,
jon

[Greg12]

USB capture cards suffer from a massive lack of bandwith. USB can only send at max, like 7 megs per second (the system reserves 4 megs)

It's not enough to get good video


With your system, i'd recomind considering an Analoge in-DV out camera and a firewire card.

[Barnabas]

I was also wondering if there are any good USB capture cards. I was looking around and I didn't see too many of them but I would like to be able to capture dvd quality and the one's that had specs only captured vcd quality.

thanx,
jon

The Hauppauge WinTV PVR USB does a nice job for DVD and SVCD captures. While USB is too slow for uncompressed AVI captures, it's plenty fast enough for compressed MPEG 1 and 2 captures.