Display adapters capture ability, How good is it ?

[elihay]

Hi
I am going to buy a new computer these days and wonder how to get the capture ability.
Capture proporsal is to create DVD, VCD or DIVX
I don't have a lot of money to spend on a profesional capture card. so as I see it I have two options:
1. Including the capture ability in the display adapter - Asus Geforce FX 5200 V9520 VideoSuite which got VIVO.
2. buy a basic FX5200 card with aditional - AVerMedia DVD EZMaker

what option will give me better capturing quality ?

(BTW: the second option is a little bit cheeper)

I have read that the AVerMedia DVD EZMaker is capble of realtime MPEG2 capturing which is good for DVD. But i am willing to loss this feature if the asus gives better quality.

thanks alot
Elihay

[SaSi]

I have an ASUS 9180 Video Suite with VIVO and twin VGA outputs.

I have no problem with capture and it performs pretty well, although some capture programs are better than others.

The only problem I have is that this VGA is long overdue for replacement if I want to keep up with VGA progress. It has a GeForce4 MX440 engine which everybody says is obsolete!

So, if I replace this card I need to find what to do with capture.

From that, I guess, you understand that my suggestion is to separate the VGA and capture card functionality. If it is cheaper, then all the better.

Also, don't consider real time MPEG-2 capture. You need a pretty fast CPU to handle that and in addition, best encoding is done with two pass VBR encoding. This rules out real time capture - encoding.

When capturing, either use Hufyuv for best quality and editability - provided you have ample disk space - or use DivX at a high bitrate (>6Mbps) with index frame frequency of at 10 frames or less (to ensure editability). Also, don't compress audio. Capture it at 48kHz 16bits and leave uncompressed.

Once you are finished with cutting, joining and the rest, encode to MPEG-2 with Tmpgenc, Mainconcept, CCE or whatever you like.

[elihay]

I was thinking of getting the to abilities seperately.
The only thing I worry about is that the final capture quality will be worse. I meen if the cheep capture card give worse results than the integrated capturing ability in the display adapter.

the questing is what is better ? Is the capture ability of display adapters is just a "nice to have" feature that the vendor add to the device in order to charge more money, or is it really worth something and can be compered with simple dedicated capture card, as the one I mentioned ?

I got these days an ASUS GeForce 1 with VIVO card on a P3 600 and not pleased with the capture result. what is the best way and program to capture with, using an ASUS product ?

[SaSi]

The display adapters that provide capture capabilities use a specific chip that does this. This function is totaly separate to the VGA functionality.

I have a Hauppage TV-Video in capture card that has the same chip for capture.

And there are not many such chipsets around.

What I mean is that the capture quality of the card is almost bound to be good. What differs among vendors is documentation and driver quality.

For example the Hauppage card was a bitch to install and use under Windows 2000 when I bought it.

New drivers were developed later and it now works well under 2000. But not as well under XP.