Rebate on Creative Digital VCR. Is it a good choice?

[rblaster]

I am looking for a tv tuner/capture card and I see that Compusa has a 50 dollar rebate on the creative digital vcr. Is it a good buy for $50? How is the quality compared to others? There's so many differant ones I'm kinda lost. Is the TV quality the same for most cards?
Thanks for any advice or suggestions.

[Barnabas]

While $50. is a good price, the Creative Labs Digital VCR is for PVR use, not really for VCD capturing. It uses non standard audio (32 kHz), and the files it makes can't be burned directly to a CD without re-encoding. The software is VERY buggy too, and messed up my Windows registry 3 times! If you want something that will make captures you can view outside of your computer, stay away from this card.

No, quality is not the same for most of the cards out there. Cards fall in to the following:

Cheap software encoding only cards, or hardware based MPEG encoding cards. Quality is rather poor when using a software encoding card, versus the hardware type.

I owned the Creative Labs Digital VCR and sent it back.
I own both an ADS Instant DVD and a ProVideo PV-231 hardware encoding card. I use the Provideo for most of my captures as it does a great job of encoding VCD's and the files are easy to work with. If you want a TV tuner as well, get the PV-233 which has a tuner and remote control. A PV-233 will run you about $100 to $115.

I am looking for a tv tuner/capture card and I see that Compusa has a 50 dollar rebate on the creative digital vcr. Is it a good buy for $50? How is the quality compared to others? There's so many differant ones I'm kinda lost. Is the TV quality the same for most cards?
Thanks for any advice or suggestions.

[rblaster]

Thanks for the info. My main use would be for VCDs so It dosent look like a good choice for me. Who sells the pv-233 I looked on pricewatch and didn't see anything.

[Barnabas]

There are only few places in the US that sell this card. The cheapest place sells the PV-233 for $115, but search PV-233 on eBay the next few days as there have been a couple of new PV-233's on there for only $100. which is the best price around. For real time vcd captures, you really can't beat this card.

[rblaster]

Thanks for the info barnabas.

[Satan's Cheerleader]

i ordered the pv233 directly from provideo for $90 usd shipped.

[Barnabas]

There is a new Pro Video PV-233 listed on eBay right now for $95. at this URL:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2029422048

[rblaster]

Can you do those large captures described in the how to guides with the pv-233 as well as the mpeg1 capturing? The pv-233 is probably the best choice for me for real time encoding since my dvd player won't play svcd's.

[Barnabas]

Not sure what you mean by "large captures", but if you are talking about high bit rate, the PV-233 can go all the up to 6144. Normal VCD is 1150. If you are talking about screen size, the max size is 352 x 240 for NTSC, an 352 x 288 for PAL. If think the guide you are refering to is talking about capturing to an avi with Virtual Dub and then encoding to vcd in TMPGenc, but this is not needed with the PV-233, as it produces an extremely sharp picture capturing and compressing on the fly to mpeg. A hardware encoder/compression card can only capture in MPEG, not in AVI.

An XVCD capture made with a bit rate of 2000 with this card, compared with my ALL In Wonder at the same bitrate are like night and day. The All In Wonder's picture looks soft, while the PV-233 looks VERY sharp and clear.

Buying a card from Taiwan is NOT something I would recommend at all, as it's more trouble than it's worth for the small savings. It now costs $35. to $40 to ship a PV-233 to the US, and dealing with ProVideo by email and fax can be tough. In the US you can buy this card at akida computer at

http://store.yahoo.com/akidacomputer/encar.html for $115.

The best price on these cards in the US I have seen are on eBay as a rule. They are not listed all the time on eBay, but there is one on eBay right now you might want to consider.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2029422048 for $95. and up, or $100. if you use buy it now before any one else does.

Al in all, I think you will be very pleased with a PV-233. It's about the only card I use now for my captures.

[scooper]

The Creative Digital VCR is fine if you want to record and watch using it's own software. It can export MPEG2 files out, but they are 32KHz audio, not 48 KHz, and you need some sort of DVD-player program to watch them. I've given up trying to get good exported files from this to convert to MPEG1 and keep sound sync. I haven't bought womble, which MIGHT be able to deal with these without losing sound sync. Creative also has a a quality control problem - one side of my audio in jack doesn't work, and mine is not the first I've heard that has this problem.

[mchiao]

Regarding to the audio synch problem... The audio is recorded at 29.966fps instead of 29.97fps. So, given that, the first 30min of the recording should stay pretty much in synch but you'll start noticing the micro delay. However, if you know how to frameserve with dvd2avi or have a way to de-mux the video and the audio from the exported mpeg file, you can redub video/audio with virtualdub. Once you loaded the wave file, goto Video->frame rate, Virtualdub will tell you that your audio is recorded at 29.966 and you have an option to synch audio video there.

Hope this helps.