Advice On Buying A Capture Card

[Haku]

OK, i installed the latest WDM drivers that are compatible with me geforce 4 ti4200 my vivo edition(got the drivers from nvidias site.But still i cant capture at half res and i cant use the YUY2 colour space(tryed VB Virtual VCR and the myvivo program that came with the card.).So im gonna invest in a capture card... Now im guessing a tv card and capture card are one in the same.

Now i was looking here http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/TV_Cards.html and i was looking at the Leadtek Winfast TV2000 XP Expert and the Leadtek Winfast DV 2000 1394 PCI TV Card .Now both use a 10bit video decoder which i guessing is a good thing.But on the leadtek site it does'nt say what resolutions they can capture to or what colour space they capture to.Nether say what chip set they use, but i dont know what chipsets are god or not.

Now are these two cards any good and which is better.Im guessing the second one as it seems to have more inputs.Also does anyone know what resolution they can handle.

Also are any of those other cards any good, or can people name me some cards that are good but not on that site as i can have a look down my local computer fair.

After capturing im wanna convert to mpeg2 for dvd.

[snafu099]

I purchased the Leadtek Winfast TV2000 Deluxe some time ago and tried using with a amd 1.2 sys. All of the funcionality was ok, but the system must have had to resources to give aceptable results.

In March I bought a new Compaq 2.5 celeron based system and tried the card in it. So far I think the results are excellent, at least for a consumer product. I have not noticed problem with audio sync, (cross my fingers, knock on wood, etc. ) I would almost say quality is on a par with captures using my ADS IDVD2 (which I consider to be very excellent) which is a usb hardware encoder at 3 times the cost, lacks a tv turner and as yet I don't think anyone has written a scheduling program for it. (there is a free sdk available)

Just bought second Tv2000 Deluxe for daughter. Did not opt for the expert model as I was not sure of differance and know the deluxe would work for her as I bought her same new Compaq. Looks like they use differnt chipsets ????

As far as I can tell it will capture at all of standard resolutions and bitrates, cbr or vbr. I have run any of the captures through a bitrate viewer to verify it actually did so. The caps looked good to me played back on standalone and that is all I cared about.

If you have the system power, this seems an excellent card for the money. I got both of mine at www.newegg.com for $52 us plus tax & free shipping. Got it in two days (they say 3)

Happy with card and newegg. Would give each a 10 for price/value
There may be better cards, I don't know, this one is working for me