Need a good, cheap capture card

[rvl123]

Hi all,

This site has helped me a ton with DVD and VCD backups in the past. Now that I have a DVD burner, I want to start capturing things like wedding vids, etc.

I don't want to spend much on a card, prob less than $50. Does anyone know if there is a such card available. I have a pretty decent system (You can click my computer specs for details.)

All suggestions are appreciated.

Thank You.

[smakayee]

Try Aver Stereo card. You can buy one for under $50.00 from Circuit City. Along with WinDVR, you can capture full DVD resolution.

[Tommyknocker]

If you have a camcorder that has firewire, you are practically there. If you use a firewire card, they start at around $15.00. If your camera is analog, I suggest you consider the WinTV Go, it cost me $49.00, uses RCA input only though.

[mkelley]

What kind of capturing?

If you are capturing DV video, then you can do what you want quite easily. Just buy any decent firewire card (I got mine for about $35) and you'll be in business.

[lechtin]

rvl123,

I did check your computer specs. If all you have is a 40GB hard drive, just watch the encoding you use for capturing. If you have a miniDV camera and ideally capture in DV for editing, you'll run out of space very quickly. Capturing in MPEG2 will save you some space, but editing in MPEG2 will make you go through 2 encoding steps (once when capturing, the other when rendering your project) losing a lot of quality.

Other than that, have fun and experiment, experiment, experiment and try lots of demo editing programs to find the one your most comfortable with.

[DereX888]

Perhaps you would want to try older ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon (the first 7200 model, 32MB), if you check around you may still find it brand new for about $70, or even less (I recently saw one in a battered box in a "sale" bin at Business Depot, Canadian version of Staples).
For capturing it will do as good as latest ATI A-I-W Radeon 9000 series cards, it won't just have so much 'horsepower' for 3D gaming.

Im not sure about dvd-specs when capturing in MPEG-2 on your system since you have Athlon XP 1800 (which is only 1.5GHz or something, and lacks SSE2 support), perhaps you should ask other XP1800 users does it loose frames when capturing in real-time encoding with AIW Radeon.