Analogue capture card advice please

[crazeplaya]

Hi

I am looking for a good quality analogue capture card, but I'm a little confused as what it should go for. I am happy to capture the video uncompressed and encode it later. I already have a firewire card that I use for capturing DV and was wondering if I could use this in some way to assist in capturing.

I'm on a fairly tight budget, so I was wondering if using a TV turner card would give decent results

Thanks for your help

[fairbay2000]

Yes, a nice TV tuner card with video capturing features like the following one should do a decent job for your analog video & audio capturing request and i have bought one of this card and it works well.

http://www.amberycorp.com/3tvtucatuca.html

Cheers !

[pippas]

I believe that most TV tuner cards will not capture as DV ,only Mpeg ,so it might be more difficult to edit.

IMHO, if you want to capture as DV thru the firewire, then go for something like the Canopus ADVC 50 or 55 - superb quality!

Downside -they are not that cheap!!

[fairbay2000]

I know a couple of video capturing cards that can accomdate both DV & AV video & audio capture together into one unit in DVD,VCD,MPEG1 &2 formats,

http://wwww.amberycorp.com/2dvmpvicasy1.html & http://www.amberycorp.com/aldvvicatvtu.html

Cheers !

[FulciLives]

I have an AverTV Stereo PCI TV tuner type capture card. It is basically the same as the AverTV Studio but the Stereo model lacks an FM receiver whereas the Studio version has a built-in FM receiver. Otherwise they are the same.

Using the BTwincap drivers I have been able to achieve excellent results using PICVideo MJPEG. Assuming you have the HDD space you could even use HuffyUV which might give you even better quality.

If you are on a budget then this is a good combo.

Another possible solution is one of the ATI AIW cards. I the 9000 AIW is not that expensive and from what other people say it also works well.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[crazeplaya]

I think I'll end up taking the TV card route. I was wondering if anyone knows of anywhere I can see examples (pictures or video) of the quality of results these cards may give

Thanks

[frankb]

Hi,

For DV capturing I just use the FireWire port in my SoundBlaster Audigy card.

For capturing from analogue (Hi-8, VHS) and for recording stuff from TV (to be burnt onto DVD afterwards) I started out with a Pinnacle PCTV Pro card. Thatworked ok - but only up to half DVD quality. Anything higher than that (ful DVD or better quality sound) would either screw up the image (very blocky!) or put the sound out of sunc within about 10 seconds.

That is when I found out (thorugh this site) that the Pinnacle card uses software encoding, and there's just a limit to what you can achieve with that. So I looked for a (TV) card that does hardware encoding and got the Hauppauge PVR-350. Now I can capture TV (did not try analogue video yet) with full DVD quality and variable bitrate. The quality is superb and (probably because this card has its own onboard soundcard) out of sync issues are a thing of the past.

Not sure whether this is what you were looking for, but I just thought I'd share my experiences with you.

Frank