Need capture card advice...

[Seven000Turns]

OK, I'm on Win98Se with 533mhz and 128mbs of RAM. I need a card for under $100 Us that I can capture DVD quality movies on. Any suggestions on a card that won't work my system too hard? Would I be able to capture using the Huffy codec? Encoding time is no issue, I just want to capture the full video, high quality, with no frames lost. Maybe a card with hardware compression? I'd appreciate any help. Thanks,
Joey

[FulciLives]

OK, I'm on Win98Se with 533mhz and 128mbs of RAM. I need a card for under $100 Us that I can capture DVD quality movies on. Any suggestions on a card that won't work my system too hard? Would I be able to capture using the Huffy codec? Encoding time is no issue, I just want to capture the full video, high quality, with no frames lost. Maybe a card with hardware compression? I'd appreciate any help. Thanks,
Joey

I capture on a P3 650Mhz with 256MB RAM and running WinXP Pro.

Using a TV tuner type capture card I can JUST barely capture at full D1 resolution (I do 704x480 29.970fps NTSC) using PICVideo MJPEG on the 19 quality setting (20 is the highest). I can do HuffyUV captures but will get a few dropped frames here and there (anywhere from 1 to 8 in a 30 minute block) so I pretty much just use PICVideo MJPEG now (plus it takes up less HDD space).

I'm telling you all this because I doubt your system will handle capturing in this way unless you limit the resolution to SVCD or Half D1.

Also it makes life SO much easier if you upgrade to WinXP (the home version should be enough i.e., you don't need the Pro version) and upgrade the memory to 512MB if you can since you need the speed boost with your computer.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
I use the AverTV Stereo PCI capture card. It is the same as the AverTV Studio but doesn't have the FM radio receiver.