inexpensive capture card

[MtBuckley46]

Hi, I'm looking into purchasing a capture card for my PC. I want to be able to capture home video (VHS) and burn it on dvd.
I have a P4@ 2 gigs
Pioneer a06 Burner.

Any suggestions??
Thanks in advance...Mike

[Tommyknocker]

I would suggest looking in the Capture Cards section at left.

[Wetmonkey]

asus makes and affordable capture card that works quite well, captures full frame rates and doesnt drop frames like some. Last i saw it was 50 bucks

[MtBuckley46]

I did look actually...wanted some suggestions from people on the board. Thanks monkey...i'll look into it.

[spectroelectro]

Although I use a Canopus as my main capture input, I bougth an incredibly low end Leadtek PV100 video capture card and have been incredibly pleased with it. I have a P4 2.4 with 256 megs RAM and Win 2K and the Leadtek video capture card performs like a champ. It lets me capture in a stunning array of real-time formats -- everything from MPEG-2, SVCD, VCD, XVid, DiVX, you name it.
This card cost me a whopping $36. But I turned out a bunch of great-looking world-class DVDs with it.
There are a numebr of drawbacks to such a low-end card. First, it doesn't perform well for capturing long blocks of video because the audio-video sync issues crop up. Second, VDubwill not capture into this card at any rez other than 320 x 240, which isn't what I consider adequate. Third, I have to capture using Leadtek's own PVR software to get these real-time capture options. Third, the time-0shifting feature doesn't work very well (pretty much doesn't work at all) so that's unusable. And the quality on this cheap a vid cap card is not up to what you get with a Canopus or a Datavideo, but this last point is not as significant as you'd think because I have foudn that MPEG-2 encoding removes so much resolution form the video that it doesn't matter. In other words, the PV100 looks worse on the computer monitor when you compare raw DV AVI cpatured frames to the Canopus or Datavideo DAC-100. But after MPEG-2 encoding I can't see any difference other than a slight increase in color saturation on the PV100 PCI card. And that is easily fixed with the input adjustment controls in the Leadtek PVR software.
Incidentally, that's another advantage of a cheap video card card. They all come with input settings so you can fiddle with the saturation and contrast and brightness to your heart's content *before* capturing. By contrast, the Canopus and DAtavideo units both do their DV encoding in hardware so you have no control over how that looks.
All told, if you have a fast system (which you do) and the rihgt mobo, even a very cheap PCI video capture card can be a great investment. I wouldn't try to capture very long blcosk fo video, however, and wouldn't recommend using an el cheapo PCI card to capture critical material. And depending on your mobo + OS + cap card combo, you may have to do a fair amount of tweaking to get your capture card to work right.
The Hauppauge has been designed from the ground up to work with Vdub as capture software, so that's one brand of cap card you might want to consider. The downside is that a number of people have complained about relatively mediocre video quality from captures on the Hauppauge.

[snafu099]

I use an ADS usb-2 device with excellent results.
DvdExpress $99 analoge inputs
Instant Dvd-2 $169 analoge inputs
Instant Dvd+dv $2?? analoge inputs/outputs
also a firewire device ????

IMHO stay away from IDVD-1 at any price other than as gift and then think twice. hardware vid encode, audio via sound card, sync issures



http://www.adstech.com

[kupton]

I'm happy with my Leadtek TV2000XP deluxe for under $50. It's based on the BT878 chipset which has excellent drivers for it at http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/ With these drivers I can capture at 720x480 in Virtualdub or Virtual VCR. I've been converting my old Hi-8 tapes to DVD and the results are excellent. Oh, The card also has a built in tuner to capture TV.

[lordsmurf]

ATI AIW = $50 = eBay

[sacajaweeda]

I hart my $39 PCI AverTV tuner card.

Oops...$29 refurb from newegg.com with free shipping

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-100-001R&depa=1&section=1

[luvvbuzz]

i got a winfast xp20000 deluxe capture tv card off ebay for £40 roughly about $50-$55) it captures straight to dvd compliant mpeg2, or mpeg1 or avi and has a briliant pvr interface. i made some great quality captures before i purchased a standalone dvd recorder.