What USB Capture Card to buy?

[justified]

I want to buy a -USB- capture card (or possibly PCMCIA) because I'm capturing with a laptop.

I've already bought ADS Instant VCD, and it was crap. I tried looking through the reviews on this site, but the comments on quality are so varied. One person said that the quality of ADS Instant VCD was good, when in fact it is far from it. What would help are actual images of what was captured.

What I'm using now is called USB Video Adapter that I bought from this Chinese place for half the price of that ADS thing and the quality is a lot better (which isn't saying much), but still not as good as I'm looking for. It has lines going across the screen sometimes which gets annoying and the picture isn't that sharp.

I'm looking for something along the lines of this image:


If anyone can suggest to me a good USB capture card for my laptop (I'm looking for USB 2 but I don't think my laptop supports it) please do so. I was thinking about Snazzi III USB2 since the reviews were good but it is a bit pricy. I'm looking for something between the $50 - $150 range, but if Snazzi's is the only good one out there then I'm willing to pay for that.

[justified]

This is what my card captures now:


Also, would using different software help? I've found that the software that comes with capture cards usually suck, and I've stuck to VirtualDub. If I tried Adobe Premiere would that be better?

[ilyo]

I have recently purchased the Avermedia EZmaker USB 2.0 and it works great...goes for about $75US...however it is very dependent on CPU power...don't even bother if you don't have at least a 2GHZ computer...

[FulciLives]

Most USB capture devices are utter crap. Don't know why but that seems to be the trend.

If you have FIREWIRE (aka IEEE 1394 or as SONY calls it i.link) on your laptop then you should be OK using the Canopus ADVC-100 but while this is a great capture device it does not have a TV tuner so if capturing from cable/satelite you need to use a converter box with analog outputs (not RF outputs) or use a VCR which functions as the tuner. Otherwise this is probably your best bet.

However ... although not very CPU intensive the Canopus ADVC-100 captures as DV AVI which creates very large files. Something like 13GB per hour. Since most laptops don't have very large hard drives you might run into a problem there. If your laptop is very fast (2.0Ghz P4 or faster with 512MB RAM or more etc.) then you might be able to capture direct to MPEG-2 which will of course create much smaller files but this is very CPU intensive when using the Canopus ADVC-100 so you risk having problems there such as dropped frames unless your laptop is very fast.

But if you have the HDD space on your laptop then you can't beat capturing direct to DV AVI since the Canopus ADVC-100 does much of the work there meaning you don't have to have the fastest computer to use it. After you capture though you will have to use a software MPEG-1/MPEG-2 encoder such as TMPGEnc or CINEMA CRAFT ENCODER (aka CCE SP or CCE BASIC) and that can take a long time if you are shooting for MPEG-2 DVD quality.

So I guess it all depends on the speed of your computer and the size of your HDD and how much time you want to take post processing your capture.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
I just noticed you mentioned VCD in your original post. If you are going to make VCD MPEG-1 then that makes the DV AVI conversion much faster than if you are converting to MPEG-2 DVD. Also since MPEG-1 is easier to encode you might not need a super fast computer to capture direct to MPEG-1 using the Canopus ADVC-100 ... at least not as much horsepower as doing MPEG-2 DVD quality captures. So that is something to consider as well.

[trhouse]

The reason many USB capture devices are so uniform in performance is because many are really the same device. Emuzed makes USB capture devices for Pinnacle, Snazzi, and Adaptec. There are several articles on the internet that mention this connection.

I have an Adaptec Videoh! DVD USB device and have used it to capture from a 650 MHz Celeron laptop with a 6 GB hard drive. I bought a dual USB2 pcmcia card for $30 and plug the Adaptec into it. I had to reduce the size of the Windows backup files in the laptop to make enough room to capture a 4.38 GB file. It worked fine. A 10/100 ethernet link was used to transfer the file to a desktop with the dvd burner.

Next I bought an 80 GB external hard drive for $120 and plugged it into a second USB2 port and now capture to that. Transferring the file to the desktop is now just unplugging the external drive and plugging it into the desktop. It is a lot faster than ethernet.

That said you could do the same by buying a dual Fireware pcmcia card and going the ADC-100 route with Fireware external hard drive which solves the drive size problem for .avi files.

I would like to compare pictures of a capture as you posted, but to make it a fair comparison are you capturing from a dvd, vhs tape, a slide, or some other source?

[justified]

I'm capturing directly from my ExpressVu satellite box, so the source is very good quality.


Edit: The capture device I have now also captures at a very high bitrate. Something like 25000kbps. When I capture it compresses at the same time. It doesn't diminish the quality that much, but without it I would probably only be able to capture 10 minutes of video at a time.

[trhouse]

ExpressVu converts a digital satellite stream to analog for your TV does it not? If you are converting the analog signal with your current card I wonder if you are mistaking the possible conversion bit rate with the actual one. For example, the Adaptec Videoh DVD device ( at least this one ) uses a Broadcom BCM7040 chip which is rated at 1-24 Mbs conversion rate. That is fine except that the dvd standard only allows 9.8 Mbs VBR maximum.

[SatStorm]

I believe that the lines you mention after capturing is nothing more than interlace lines. Or, you tried to capture macrovision protected transmissions (like movies) which your card driver's overide, but not perfectly...

USB capture is not the ideal, but if you are limited to it, then try comercial products like windvr 3.0 or powerVCR 3. Those don't have top quality, but concerning the hard disc size you have, it is a solution...

An alternative, is to try capture to xvid/divx using programs like VirtualVCR or virtualdub. But this type of capture needs more than 1.2 Ghz to succeed 1/2 D1 framesize in a decent way, this solution in general is only for watching on PC and as a source, mpeg 4 is terrible. Think those limitations before try it.

Firewire is a better alternative if possible.

[justified]

I was thinking about Firewire but my only options are PCMCIA and USB. I have USB1.1 but I want to get a USB2 device since they are backward compatible and the next laptop I get will probably have USB2.

Space is not a big issue for me since I have a 20GB hard drive and also an external USB drive that I can move stuff to.

I don't care much for software since I'm happy capturing/editing with VirtualDub, encoding with TMPGEnc, and burning with Nero, so all these capture cards that are so expensive because of the software I would rather not have to pay for.

I was not aware that Pinnacle and Snazzi had the same people make capture devices for them. In that case, would in be better to get a Pinnacle since they are sold in Canada? If I pay for the Snazzi it would cost a lot because of shipping and taxes.

Anyway here are some products I found from Pinnacle and Dazzle that are sold here, which one would you think is best?

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1051384618025&skuId=4859585&type=product&pr...oryId=cat01054
Pinnacle Systems Studio DV Mobile Version 8 ($99.99)
The only PCMCIA card I found, but what exactly does "DV" mean?

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1055388016364&skuId=5646134&type=product&pr...oryId=cat01054
Pinnacle Systems Studio MovieBox USB ($199.99)
This got good reviews on this site but what's up with the 15-20fps framerate?

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1069297834888&skuId=5870649&type=product&pr...oryId=cat01054
Dazzle Digital Video Creator 80 ($69.99)
Low resolution and it doesn't work on Windows XP??

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1064607747431&skuId=5870729&type=product&pr...oryId=cat01054
Dazzle Digital Video Creator 150 ($149.99)

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1051384719902&skuId=5381151&type=product
Pinnacle Systems Linx USB Plus Video Editing Kit ($69.99)

Btw my computer is 2.4GHz running Windows XP.