MSI MX400 Pro-vt32s

[hamnose]

I saw this board that has video in. I went to MSI's website to see what they have to say and they have very little to say. I wrote them and no response. Anybody familiar with this board? I want to know if it can capture at 30 fps and at the normal resolutions ( you know 720 x 520 or whatever ) The salesman says oh yeah it can do all that, but for $99 I have my doubts. If you have this thing please let me know how great it is or what a piece of s___ it is.

[JHebert]

I'm not familiar with it but I found this link at MSI to download the product manual for that card:
http://www.msi.com.tw/support/manual/vga.htm
If it doesn't specifically list the capture sizes, try to at least find out what chipset it uses for video capture, such as BT878 or whatever. Then you could check the chipset manufacturer for more information.
It probably doesn't have any real-time hardware MPEG or MJPEG encoding features. Instead, you would capture to AVI using a software codec like Huffyuv or PicVideo MJPEG. The speed of your system will make a big difference in the resolution and framerate that you can capture, in addition to the specs on the card.

[SHS]

JHebert is rigth it dosen't have any real-time hardware encoding.
The chipset must like lee made by Conexant and it S-Video input with RCA and S-Video output.

[hamnose]

Thank you for the link jHebert, very useful (don't know how I missed that on MSI's site) still it didn't tell me enough. I went to this MSI site and a few people were raving how they get full resolution capture with no loss of frames on crappy computers so I'm probaly going to get this just based on that hearsay. I just want to record some video from a vcr without compressing it. I got 70 Gbytes for crying out loud. I still wish someone would tell me they have this card and its just great. I know there's a few hundred of you out there and I'm sure a couple of you read this...well come on now and help me out guys! By the way, what in sam hill is HW ACC?

[JHebert]

OK I searched and found a few reports on that card but they didn't say much about the TV capture and output performance.

However a review at PC Stats showed that the card uses the Philips SA7108E chip for TV In/Out functionality and has a few photos of the card. The link is http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=819

I'm not too familiar with this chip compared to the more common Conexant/Brooktree and Chrontel stuff but I found a review of a similar Gainward MX400 that also uses the Philips SA7108E. That review claimed it could capture up to 720x576. The link is http://www.bench-house.com/video/roundup/gainvshercmx400/gainvshercmx400_001.html

It doesn't have hardware based MPEG capturing so you would capture using a software AVI codec like Huffyuv or PicVideo MJPEG, then edit, and convert to MPEG or whatever. Huffyuv gives best quality capture because it is lossless, so the quality is same as uncompressed, but it compresses to about 2:1 or 3:1 to save space. PicVideo is also good at high quality settings and uses less drive space than Huffyuv.

Your mileage may vary a lot depending on the quality of the drivers for the card, and the speed of your system especially the cpu and hard drive.