I tried Software compression with both my ATI TV Wonder USB and Hauppauge WinTV PCI and the results were less than desirable. To be honest it was pretty poor, but I am running a 500mhz machine. I assumed that Hardware compression was the only way to get good Quality. Since I could decide on what card to get and don’t have the money for a new Card I capture big AVI files then spend hours and hours compressing them.

Then a couple months ago a friend of mine from college got a DVD-R Drive. He live a quarter of the way across the county so he mailed me a DVD and the quality was great. I assumed that he had a Dazzle DVC II or something along that line. I was surprised to find out that he was using was a $20 Generic Video Capture Card and the capture software bundled with his DVD-R drive (It’s a commercial product, WinVCR PowerVCR or something like that). I had him send me a couple Short MPEG1 files, 1156kbit and 2600kbit, and they looked as good as my files and he created them a whole lot easier and in a lot less time. I think what it boils down to is that he is using a 1.2 ghz machine and I am using a 500 mhz.