Advice for Analog Capture Card Purchase

[betaKing]

I'm looking for advice on what capture card to buy. I want to capture old home movies from Betamax (PAL) tapes and burn them onto DVDs. I would like to capture at 720x576 at 25fps into AVI. I'll do the converting of the AVI to MPEG2 on a spare machine (don’t want a card that does hardware encoding). I'm hoping to spend around $100.

I currently have an ATI Radeon 64mb DDR Vivo and have been trying to capture with that but am unable to get past the 288 lines barrier (for AVI). I have tried for the last 3 weeks to get past the barrier but I can’t (I’ve tried all the guides and advice on this site (and others), different drivers, clean installs… but I can’t get it to work). I have given up on this card for capturing. So…

I've been looking at Hauppauge’s WinTV-PCI but I get conflicting information on its capabilities. On Hauppauge's website it states that "In all cases, the WinTV can capture .AVI files in real time video (30fps), at 320 X 240 resolution or smaller" (http://www.hauppauge.com/html/capture.htm). When I look in the comments of the Capture Card List for this card some people say they are able to capture at 720x576 while others can only capture at 320x240.

My Current setup is:
OS: Win 2000 with Service Pack 2
Motherboard: Asus A7V
CPU: AMD Thunderbird 1Ghz
RAM: 512mb
Video: ATI Radeon 64mb DDR Vivo
Sound: SoundBlaster Live
Drives: 1 - 40gb ATA100 7200rpm Maxtor drive for OS & video storage
1 - 80gb ATA100 7200rpm Maxtor drive for capture only
1 - 120gb ATA100 5400rpm Maxtor drive for video storage
Capture Software: Virtual Dub

Is the WinTV-PCI the right card for the job I want to do? Is there a better card?

Any help will be most appreciated!

[spidey]

I have a Hauppage WinTV PCI. I would recommend using Huffyuv with it. But you will need lots of drive space to cap uncompressed. It takes approx 40 gig for 2 hours.

I also had a Dazzle DVC 1 and it capped well to xvcd, it'd handle up to 2600 x 224 mpeg 1. But unless you kept it as an XVCD, you had to re-encode.

So since that was the case and I had the drive space, I preferred the internal card, and sold the external unit.

[jabber]

I know you're going to hear opinions to the opposite, but check out the creative digital VCR. Has svid/comp inputs, cable input & tuner, captures 640x480 mpeg2. It's tricky to encode the mpeg2's but once you get the hang of it, it's great! It's not bad for $89!

[SHS]

betaKing take look at the new WinTV-PVR 250 or 350.