Video/capture card suggestion!

[Ewen Howe]

I am very new here and leaning how to make mpg by myself from either a miniDV camorder or VHS VCR tape. I have a Pt4 1.5GHz/Ram512MB/HD80GB tesktop with Asus APG-G7100pro graphic card plus a firewire/IEEE1394 card. For capturing DV, the firwire card will do. What about capturing VHS video then? I think I need to add a video capture card. It seems to be ATI all-in-wonder is popular, but I love my Asus graphic card which has been working fine for me. If look at a plain video captrue card, which one do you suggest? What difference between those very cheap and very expensive? Of course, the specification/price is an issue to me. I see some cards also have TV-in or -out function that allows to watch TV on PC. Does this TV utility has also the regional coding problem like we see for normal TV, since we may move to Europe next year. Thanks very much!

Ewen

[Chaoji3791]

You could either get an analogue capture card like Pinnacle's very good Studio DC10+ or you could get some kind of analogue/DV "bridge" device which will allow you run an analogue signal through RCA cables or an S-Video cable through the bridge and along a Firewire cable into your PC via your Firewire card. Dazzle makes such a bridge, I believe.

C h a o j i

[Ewen Howe]

Thanks a lot, Chaoji, for your suggestion! I will look at a Pinnacle card. Thanks a gain!

Ewen

[macleod]

I have a 1.2 gig emachine on XP. I tried EVERYTHING to get the analogue pinnacle product to work and it would not. The XP drivers (at least for me) don't work. I bought the AIW TV tuner card and it works perfect (for me) for converting VHS over to VCD (although I'd recommend going with SVCD).

[holistic]

What model/make is your DV cam ??
If it have analog INPUTS try taping your VHS to it ,then just connect the camera to the 1394 card and transfer.

review the 'Capture Cards' section under 'Other' this may help with your decision

[Ewen Howe]

Amm... a good idea! I am using Sony miniDV. But, we have a lot VHS tapes of our kids that need to be converted into VCD (for ease of storage), thus this way may not be practical since we have to record the tape first, capture via 1394 and then convert... I am thinking of buying a AIW card...Thanks anyway!

Ewen

[Tiras]

Hi Ewen Howe, you do not need AWI with your setup. If you have IEEE1394 communication board (this is not a capture card) you can use your miniDV as a bridge, from your VHS analog to miniDV (you must have special cable with RCA jacks Video Audio L/R) switch miniDV to VTR mod with out cassette inside and fire up software which supported IEEE1394 (Adobe Premiere or Ulead MediaStudio or that which you have) and transfer your analog to DV .AVI. This you can after encode to VCD or SVCD.

[Ewen Howe]

miniDV as a bridge?! This is a nice idea that we were not aware of. Thanks a lot! I know I will learn more from this amazing site and forum. Thanks again, Tiras!

Ewen