capturing while watching...

[DiViNeLeFT]

im in the market for a capture card... i want one that will do quality captures while allowing me to watch what im capturing at full screen at the same time. ive heard good things about the wintv cards but a friend of mine has the wintv go and it only lets him watch the vid at normal vcd size, if it goes any bigger it just shows the start frame while capturing.

any suggestions??

[DiViNeLeFT]

anyone??

[bpjenn]

I have been using ATI All-in-Wonder cards for many years. They will let you capture and watch at full screen. Go to there web site for complete details. http://www.ati.com.

[vhelp]

DiViNeLeFT,

The ATI-TV Wonder will allow you to watch tv full screen while
capping, but I don't know how well. Maybe at 1.2g speed?
And, the ATI Rage Fury WILL allow you to watch full screen
while capping, and even at full res. 720x480 - though I would
get 1 - 15% frame drops... after many tests.

The tv wonder only does MPEG1, but the Rage Fury does
both MPEG1 and MPEG2 in real time - software that is.
NOT THE BEST quality but for a newbie that doesn't know
the difference, wont matter none. Also, these two ATI
cards (and others) cap in .AVI format as well, for later encoding.

Again, because I have this unit. . . The WinTV PVR (USB), but
there is a PCI version too. My usb unit will allow me to watch
full screen tv while capping. In fact, this is what I do regularly,
if I feel up to watching it - else I just surf, and come back an
hour later to cut commercials out and burn to cd. ...I did
(burned) 4, 1 hour TV programs this evening with this card.

I should also like to mention the DC10+ card. Though this
is a MJPEG codec, it's hardware. Quality is pretty good, IMO.
But others may feel color is off. But, once you master it's
color problem (as I have), it's as good as ANY other straight
.AVI cap card out there!
Now, this card comes with Studio xx but only has a small
window for viewing video in. My way around this was to use
the OUT feature that this card has. This way, I can watch
exactly how it's gonna look on TV, without loosing any
quality, if at all maybe 1%. Just be sure you have NO
IRQ conflicts with the card! Cap at 640x480, and at 3000bts
and you'll be happy! A 1 hour TV show caps at aprox 12gigs
given the above.

Well, that's pretty much it for now.

[yoshi1668]

I got question about that DC10+ and the ATI also. You mentioned about lose frame of about 1-15%. That's sound very significant, is that right? Does PCI version better than a USB version? How big an AVI file will be for an hour long video?

[DiViNeLeFT]

i was looking into the dc10+... i like that card... but another pinnacle card that i liked was the pctv pro... i like the idea of gettin a remote and a tv tuner with a card that looked to have a lot of the same capture features as the dc10+.... anyone know if that one will let you cap while watching at full screen??

[mikewg]

I can get just under 6 hours on my 60 Gig hard drive, so expect an hour of AVI to be upwards of 10 Gigs.

[NeVeRLiFt]

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1555

Theres the best of the best!

I'm selling my AIW Radeon and getting it!

[DiViNeLeFT]

two reasons i dont want that...

ati is notorious for their bad driver support.

it costs so much it better suck and **** me for what i would have to spend.

[NeVeRLiFt]

LoL

[homerpez]

If they don't solve the frame-drop-synch-crash problem (even on my 1 GHZ machine with unfragmented hard drives, I still drop frames randomly, corrupting the whole capture!), NO SALE.

Isn't there some way they can utilize RAM to create a write buffer, so not to drop frames? (if you run Task Manager in Win 2k or XP, you'll see ATI software doen't take any advantage of your RAM at all!)