Entry Level Card

[unrealityman]

I'm looking for sumthing sub $100 with S-Video input.

So far I've considered the Avermedia Aver TV and the ATi TV Wonder.

These any good? Got any suggestions?

Thx in advance--

[CauCauCau]

I'm looking for sumthing sub $100 with S-Video input.

So far I've considered the Avermedia Aver TV and the ATi TV Wonder.

These any good? Got any suggestions?

Thx in advance--

I've not heard too much about the Avermedia card, but I have heard about the ATi one. It uses a pretty standard chip made by Brooktree/Conexant BT878 I believe. If you are going to go with a BT878, there may be better options than ATi. I've heard that ATi cards often have macrovision enabled so you can't capture from commercial VHS tapes, so it may not work if you're going to be backing up your VHS movie collection to your computer/cds. I decided to go with the Provideo PV951. It's just another cheap capture card with the BT878 on it. Some of the cheaper cards don't capture audio all that great. Often there will be hissing and whatnot.

There's an exhaustive list of cards on the left under the capture card section. If you can find what you're looking for at a store with a good return policy, buy one that looks right for you and try it out. If you don't like it or it doesn't work, take it back.

Here's the Avermedia one:
http://www.vcdhelp.com/capturecards.php?CaptureCardRead=Avermedia%20AverTV%20Studio&Search=Search

Some reasonable reviews.

Check out some of the reviews and if they mention a lot of hissing sound on a cheaper card, it might be one to avoid.

Here's my setup:

ASUS K7V Motherboard with a not-so-hot VIA chipset
128 megs of 133 mhz ram.
Athlon 700 mhz Slot A
Fujitsu 17GB 5400 rpm drive
Windows 98 & Windows XP Professional dual booting.
3Demon Provideo PV951 BT878 TV-Tuner/Capture card

I can capture at quite high resolution with no frame drops. The last capture I did was 720x576 using Picvideo's MJPEG codec and uncompressed sound with no frames dropped. It works far better under XP than 98. I use the universal drivers you can find http://btwincap.sourceforge.net. I don't bother capturing under windows 98 because of the FAT32 file size limit.

Tell more about what your computer is, what you're going to be capturing, what you might encode it to and what you want as your final product and I'm sure other people can give you some more detailed suggestions.

I'd recommend trying out various BT878 based cheap cards until you find one you like. If you've got the hard drive space, I'd recommend capturing to Huffy (which is lossless) or a really high quality MJPEG and then encode it to whatever final form you want. I've had one capture so far with the audio and video out of sync, but was able to fix that with Virtualdub without a problem.

Your system info and what you plan on doing with it exactly would be great to know before I'd recommend any one card though.

Cau

[bpjenn]

Pay a little more and get the ATI 7500 All-in-Wonder card. Then use Ulead VideoStudio 6 to capture, edit, encode, author and write to CD or DVD. Great program, does it all. I think the All-in-Wonder card comes with version 5, then upgrade to version 6 for $45. And, then find Ulead DVD MovieFactory on eBay (I paid $15) to do even better DVD authoring.

[unrealityman]

Here are my computer specs:

Asus A7V333 Motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 2000+
512MB PC2700 DDR RAM
Elsa Gladiac 920 (nVidia GeForce3 Chipset)
SB Live! Value Soundcard
120GB 7200rpm Maxtor HDD
Linksys LNE100TX 10/100 NIC
300W PSU
21" FlatCRT Trinitron Monitor with Anti-Static/Glare Coating
Razer Boomslang 2000
Black Dell Keyboard (muh fave =P)
*//Stuff that doesn't really matter//*
16x Generic DVD Drive
Mid-Tower Computer Case
Teac Floppy (Teac baby, yea!)
iOmega ZIP Drive (salvaged from old Compaq)

I really don't wanna spend the extra cash for the AIW cuz I already got a GeForce 3... The next upgrade will be either the NV30 or the Radeon 9700 probably during mid to late summer, when they get cheaper. As far as editing, I have Premiere, which I assume is good... (is it, or is there something better?)

For my uses of the capture card, mainly I'm looking for a card that will display a high quality of video to the screen *without* encoding. Ofcourse I still wan't to do capturing, and that lossless huffy method that was mentioned sounds good, especially since i have a pretty good amount of HDD space.