Any reviews of the Leadtek TV2000XP capture card?

[enu]

I'm in the market for a cheap capture card, and have narrowed my choices down to either the Hauppauge WINTV-FM, or the Leadtek TV2000XP. From what I gather, the Leadtek card is fairly new to market, so there's not much information out there yet (at least none that I could find).

I found a review here:

http://www.ocprices.com/index.php?command=view&ID=1480

But I was hoping that someone might have more in-depth information on it's performance.

[homerpez]

I'd be interested too... I'm almost fo a mind to replace my aging ATI AIW Radeon board with a more high-end 3-D board (I have a feeling that I can actually play games on a 1 GHz Athlon at 1024x768... but not with the AIW Radeon)

Actually, since I only do AVI capturing now (with Huffy)... is there any solution out there that's ultra-simple (read: cheap) and also good quality? I mean a separate card system, like the Leadtek...

All I need is S-Video input, AVI capture abaility at most any resolution. Something so I can upgrade to a new faster Radeon or Geforce 4 Ti board, while not having to lose capture ability...

[man_friday]

any updates on experiences would be welcome....

[Jacky]

I bought this card a few days

Note that this card use only WDM driver, so it cannot use virtualdub to capture!

I have 2 card:
1. Pixelview DVR
3. Leadtek TV2000XP

Let me take a comparision below:

For Pixel View DVR:
It use booktree VFW driver. I capture by virtualdub and compress by DivX3.1 and MPEG layer 3 codecs into AVI file.
1. The file size is small! 1 minute around 7.5 MB.
2. The colour is deep and good!
3. The video is very smooth and comfortable to watch!
4. However, it is a bit blur and not sharp enough for the edge!
5. Have driver imcompatible problem!
6. Cannot use PowerVCR to capture since it use WDM driver!

For Leadtek TV2000XP:
First of all, you must download the updated driver from Leadtek homepage first, since the orginial driver have great problem! The inhouse develop capture software is not good, so I use newest version of Intervideo's WINDVR to capture into MPEG1 file and set the birate at around 2079kbit/s in order to get good quality video and keep the file size acceptable!
1. File size is larger! 1 min around 17MB! Since I use higher biirate in order to keep the video quality.
2. The edge is sharp and never blur!
3. Colour is not good! a bit dark and some noise appear
4. Cannot use Virtualdub !

In conclusion, I do not recommend Leadtek TV2000XP!

[SHS]

When using WDM drivers you youe best beat is iuVCR you can use virtualdub but it take more to setup depend on how the drv where made.

[man_friday]

Thank you SHS, look like WinTV will be on the shopping list

[Jacky]

I have to make an amendment here!

Leadtek TV2000Xp is good! I capture in high birate to MPEG 1 at 320X240 to get a high quality MPEG1 first. Then convert it to VCD format by TMPGEnc! After this, I use TSCV to burn it into CDR and play it in my DVD player in TV. Unbelievably, the quality is very high!!! Both the colour and lighting are better when play in TV rather than computer monitor! That's amazing! It completely change my attitude towards this card!