What capture card do I need?

[Rams]

I'd like to record tv shows on my pc and play them out to my tv. I don't really care about burning the shows, I'm really just looking to turn my pc into a digital VCR. Can this be done for cheap?

Thanks!


1.4 AMD 512mb 160gb

[bgrieb]

If you need a good tuner, check out the MSI TV @nywhere series (roughly $50). If you just want to record from a composite or SVideo input like I do, than I can highly recommend the Prolink X-Capture (roughly $40). Both of these cards use newer Conexant chipsets.

If you want one if the old Brooktree based cards, they're everywhere for under $50. The advantage to them is that tons of people have them and there are really good WDM reference drivers available.

Once you've got the hardware, free software is easy to find.

BG

[Rams]

Thanks for your help!

[lordsmurf]

ATI AIW cards do great too

[FulciLives]

I'd like to record tv shows on my pc and play them out to my tv. I don't really care about burning the shows, I'm really just looking to turn my pc into a digital VCR. Can this be done for cheap?

Thanks!


1.4 AMD 512mb 160gb

You might want to consider the Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350

This is a PCI capture card that features a hardware based MPEG-1/MPEG-2 encoder. This means that all of the encoding is handled by the hardware in the card which will free up the CPU load on your computer whereas most capture cards can only capture to MPEG-1/MPEG-2 using a lot of CPU power.

The other nice thing about this model is that it features composite and S-Video output that is on par with most stand alone DVD players. In other words if you use this to output your captures (or any MPEG-1/MPEG-2 file) you will get MUCH better quality than you can from the TV-out of a computer VIDEO card. The only "catch" here is that the card only captures MPEG-1/MPEG-2 and only outputs MPEG-1/MPEG-2 but from your requirements this should not be a problem in fact it is a good thing!

If you encode at the highest rate then 1 hour of footage will equal about the size of a single DVD-R disc (about 4.3GB) but this card has many different levels of resolutions and bitrates from VCD to SVCD to DVD Half D1 and DVD Full D1 and can do both NTSC and PAL.

Last but not least here is a website with more info:

http://www.shspvr.com/

Good luck!

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[spiderman2k1]

Dazzle 2 go to www.dazzlegeek.com to see if it work's with your mother board you can buy it at http://www.shopharmony.com/ Also ATI AIW are good to if your not a gamer then get the cheapest one there all the same they use the same software. Also heard good about Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 and 350 model's

I own dazzle 2 and ATI AIW Dazzle 2 is better for Satellite work and ATI AIW is better for VHS recording's Both card's are good. There is a timer for the Dazzle 2 you will find it at www.dazzlegeek.com

http://www.spawns.dk/svcd/index.htm

http://spawn.dk/svcd/

Keep in mond all these card's can be a tad tricky getting them to work just right

Windows 2000 or XP will do the best job's