Help picking capture card/tv tuner...

[RammsteinNicCage]

First off, I don't understand the differences between a capture card or a tv tuner card. What I'm looking to do is get VHS tapes in my VCR into mpg or avi on my computer. Do they both do that? If so, which would probably be better for me?

Here are the stats on my comp:

Compaq Presario 5BW131
Intel Celeron Processor 667 MHz
320mb RAM
100gb disk space (about 55gb free)
Windows XP Pro SP1

I'd like to keep it in the general vicinity of $50....

Any other info needed?

Jennifer

[tweedledee]

First of all go to "capture cards" on the left side of the page. Then read the comments. I use a WINFAST 2000 DELUXE which will capture vhs from a vcr plus act as a tv tuner. Try a little homework.

[RammsteinNicCage]

I did read the comments, which probably ended up confusing me more than helping me. What one person hates, another person loves. I don't know how much of an effect my hardware has on what I should get, that's why I decided to ask you guys.

Jennifer

[furdog]

Strictly speaking, a tuner card has a TV tuner onboard so that if you hook up an coax attenna or cable, you can change the channel and see a broadcast station on your TV.
A capture card can take a video signal (Composite or S-Video) and capture the signal encode it to avi (typically) and save it to disk.
You will usually get both functionalities on a Tuner card, but if you are not interested in the capbililty of watching TV on you PC just a capture card will work. Read the description carefully to make sure has desired capability.
What you described was capture capability. I have a Pinnacle PCTV card (Tuner & Capture), for around that price, which works fine. Read the guides for one that works (there are drivers around to enhance the performance & capabilities of some of the inexpensive cards based on the type of capture chip).
Cards at that price range typically really capture in uncompressed AVI (large files). If they say MPEG read carefully, it is usually done in software and real-time MPEG conversion is processor intensive - probably not practical with your system. So capture to AVI realtime (clean, defrag'd disks; virtualdub or other), edit (virtualdub or other) and then convert to MPEG/DIVX afterward for size (TMPGEnc or virtualdub), then delete the orig AVI file.

[RammsteinNicCage]

Thanks a lot, that really helped out.

Jennifer