Pinnacle DC10 opinions?

[azali]

Rather than mailing each individual who posted opinions in the capture cards section, I was hoping that anyone who has opinions with first hand experience on this capture card can give me info about it. I am interested in getting one and capturing at the highest possible bitrate at 640x480. From what I've read on the site, the latest drivers are supposed to solve a lot of synchronization problems. I would be using this card on Windows ME with a PII 400mhz, 30 gig 7200 rpm drive (C drive, not dedicated) and 192 megs of pc100 ram. Most likely I would be using the multisegmenting feature to defeat the 2 gig barrier. Please reply with any relevant information about this card if possible and any virtualdub (video for windows driver) issues I might encounter. Thanks

[vhelp]

Ok,

Very briefly, I can give you this much:

* I purchased this card... oh, maybe 3 or more months ago.
* My highest I can only capture at is 608x464 (cropped)
I can't seem to get the full 640x480 on my Athlon 900mhz PC133 128mb ram
I use the Pinnacle's Studio (can't remember version, but it's old I guess, and
not version 7). I'm pretty satisfied with my DC10+ card. It gives me pretty
good capture quality, though slitely fuzzy or blurry, ...can be helped a little
with the proper filter (use the sharpen filter in VD). Looks sharp on my TV.
* While capturing in studio (actually, I think it v1.76 on cd) I can capture for
70 or more minutes (commercials and all) and when I click on the stop button,
a message box pops up reminding me of the 2gig limit has been past.
When I go to me capture drive (D:\) I see segmented .avi files, i.e.,

Video 1.avi
Video 1_01.avi - 2.048gig
Video 1_02.avi - 2.048gig
Video 1_03.avi - 2.048gig
Video 1_04.avi - 2.048gig
Video 1_05.avi - 1.7gig

(above, if memory serves me correctly)

After many months experience in utilizing DC10+ card for
my SAT captures, I finally splerged and got an S-VHS machine
for archiveing my captures. I find myself doing a great deal
more captures now that I have this card licked (sort of).
I can't seem to STOP finding things to capture.
* I mostly capture my Directv (SAT), lately, I've ben trying
my hand on VHS tapes (just starting out), but there are some
kinks that have to be worked out, but for most part, I've
actually gotton some pretty good results (yesterday I did
some test clips and was somewhat satisfied with the results).
Anyway, I use my S-VHS to captures shows like the new
ST-E on Wednesdays, and Directv's Freeview's every weekend,
ST-Voy, ST-DS9 when it airs on weekends, ST-O airs on SciFi
everyday at 6pm, ect. I can't encode / capture everything,
so I Tape to S-VHS what ever I can.

For example, I did a capture off my SAT of ST-E and encoded
it today during work. It just finished encoding to SVCD about 10
minutes or so ago. the whole process took 7hrs 39min. on
my Athlon 900mhz system - maybe faster on other systems.

Well, this is my hobby, and I LOVE IT!! Can't say if it's for
you, but for us who don't use those MPEG-2 CHIP cards, this
is pretty much what we go though daily. But, wait till those
DVD rewriters come way down in price and their CDRs CDRWs
disks as well. . . .

Do I do VCD creation? Answer, NO! Just not worth it to me!

Well, that's pretty much it... did I say brief??
Hope this helps you out in your decision(s) on what cap card
to get!

[bbb]

I am also using DC 10+ on a testing basis and am quite satisfied with the quality.

I am curious though. Regarding the muliple avi files, how do I feed them into TMPGENC to produce a single SVCD MPEG2 clip?

Do you use Virtual Dub to concatenate them together and then frameserve into TMPGENC?

Also, since TMPGENC records into 2 gig segments, does that mean I can capture however many minutes until my hard drive is filled? Or is there a set size limit in the Studio capture software?

[bertmartin]

I also have the DC10+ and have been satisfied so far. I have only used it to capture some home movies so have not run into the 2 gig problem. I downloaded version 1.06 from Pinnacle web site to solve the 2 gig capture problem. I like the editing software and plan to upgrade to Studio 7 software for DC10 when it comes out in a few weeks. I also have a couple of questions.

My videos could be sharper so I got the PicVideo codex (as recommended on tools page) and installed it. When I made it the preferred MJPEG codex, Studio software would not run and asked me to re-install. I did this and the codex went away. I forgot to upgrade to version 1.06 so I did this and the codex came back. There is no way to select this codex for capture from Studio so I selected it for output file (AVI). When I output my edited AVI file the rendering went fast. I viewed the AVI file in WMP ok but when I tried to encode with TMPGE I got no video, only audio. I went back to the IntelVideoR32 codex & it worked. Is there a way to use the PicVideo codex or did I waste $18? Also is there a way to configure TMPGE to see the AVI file? Should I just use the codex that came with the card or be happy? I'm always looking to get a sharper VCD.