What's the Best way to Capture

[Smd]

I'm thinking about getting a program/hardware to capture a video from my VCR to my Computer, I'm just wondering what's the best program in the price range of $300 or less, I was looking at CompUSA and they had some dazzle program for $229, anyway if anyone has any suggestions of what to get, or what not to get let me know.

[24sevenpc]

I am about to buy the ATI All In Wonder.I also have my eyes on the nvidia gforce4 w/ personal cinema.I figure the agp slot will transfer faster and better quality than through a usb port or PCI slot.A guy at best buy told me the AIW will capture at very good quality better than say the windvd PCI card could.

[Executioner]

Is this the Dazzle program your talking about:
http://www.dazzle.com/products/hw_bridge.html

[Thorn]

I've had good luck with an ATI AIW 128 as well as my new Geforce4 4200 from gainward. Both have been AGP, but I think for capture purposes PCI can handle the ~16MB/s that raw 720x480 requires. AGP is really necessary for gaming where there is much higher bandwidth.

USB, however, is not suitable for capturing. The bandwidth is ~1.5 MB/s and you can't do anything but mpeg capture for that. At the consumer level, this is NOT recommended because any good hardware mpeg capture device costs a lot of money. Crappy ones aren't too expensive, though

By the way, the best software for capturing video is free: virtualdub. It's just the card that you have to worry about. If you dont' game a lot and aren't die-hard on capture quality, I'd recommend getting an old AIW... I don't know if newer ones have better capture quality than the old ones, but I doubt it. ATI has always had a good rep for tuner cards.

[Smd]

Thanks for all your responses and suggestions, and yes the Dazzle program I was talking about is the one in Executioner's message.

[Thorn]

Oh, I figured you meant a USB dazzle product (which I've heard bad things about). I don't know anything about the DV one, but it has potential. DV isn't lossless, but it's still pretty high quality. FYI DV takes about 13GB of HD space per hour, and Huffyuv compression (best quality capture from a capture card) can take about 30-35GB per hour. Your final encode format will be smaller of course, but you should have the scratch space. If you already have a new Geforce4 (just checked your computer specs) you're best off with a PCI capture card or the DV bridge executioner linked to. The capture card would be cheaper, but it's up to you how you want to work, what extra features you need, and how easy it would be to use one over the other.