Need advise on upgrading to a new tuner/capture card.

[DocRock]

I bought an old Win TV pci tuner card about 2 years or so ago. I have been experimenting with capturing from my Tuner Card's tuner, from the VCR and from my webcam. I'm mainly interested in capturing from the tuner and from my VCR into files that are VCD compliant, with as good a result as I've seen posted in the newsgroups, like the music videos put out by Purple Microdot or the guy on the multimedia newsgroup that posted the entire HBO Band of Brothers series. Those files are amazingly clear for VCD.

That is my goal. But im not sure what combination of hardware software those guys are using. Ive seen a lot of ppl here use the raedon card, but my Video card is fine. I just would need a Tuner/Capture card. what are some of the better deals for the price (under a hundred bucks). (I have a Geforce 2 ultra 64MB DDR card, running on a P3 1000 processor, with 2 hard drives, a 30 and a 20 Gb Western Digital 7200 rpm Hard drives.) My system should be good enough for capping TV and VCR with decent clarity, right? (btw, I'm running the Win XP OS). My caps are fair to good, but no matter how much i tweak the brightness and contrast, there seems to always be a constant, how shall i put this...a very fine background haze. Now I realize some of this is due to compression, but these killer caps I've seen, with their smooth,clear reproduction, don't have this "haze". This effect (or flaw as it were) is mostly pronounced in full screen, or when watching the VCD on my DVD player and TV.
So since my system should be fast enough, would a jump up to the ATI TV Wonder pci card , in and of itself, improve the captures that im getting on my Win TV tuner card (which is at least 2 years old! Maybe 3!)?

Also, I'm getting pretty nice VCD files using WinDVR, that compresses in real time(A GODSEND), but as I'm just starting to learn, there is a trade off in quality. Is there any way to clean that up as well? Is capturing in Virtual Dub to AVI then converting with TMPEGenc the way to get best results. And i can't capture in 352 x 240 (vcd format) in Virtual Dub (says it's "unsupported". Would that be my Win TV card it's refering to?). So what resolution should i capture the AVI file to using Virtual dub in order for it to have the optimum compression and time using TMPEG to convert to the VCD mpg file?

Bottom line is that i only have under a hundred bucks to spare on a new tuner card, assuming that this will even help clean up my captures. Is the TV Wonder (not the USB or VE models) a good way to go, if a new card would help?
And on Real Time vs Offline compression? Opinions would be warmly accepted! Thank you and Take Care, Doc Rock

[DocRock]

Oh yeah, i forgot. I also have 512 MB of PC 133 RAM on my system. thanks again. Doc Rock

[Arepiv]

I wouldn't go for a new card, yours seems fine to me. Hauppauge is using a Conexant video decoding chip and even if Conexant has released 2 or 3 video decoding chips since you bought your card (they are now with Fusion 878A) I am not sure you will perceive the difference when playing with VHS.

The good quality of the videos you are reporting is probably due to some additional filtering made there. I found the smart noise filter in Virtual Dub to be very efficient with VHS caps. You could search for VD filters (there are a lot on the web !) and play with them to find the one which suits you best. Note that best result is obtained by frame serving to TMPG. Another reason could also be the program used for converting to mpg, I saw some posts saying that TMPG creats more artifacts than CCE.

Arepiv

[N0SoopForU]

Is this "haze" you speak of kind of like a smokey grey? If so, then you probably just need to adjust the contrast of your TV tuner or run a contrast filter over your AVI before encoding.

Can you can make a small sample for us to download and take a look at?

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: N0SoopForU on 2001-11-20 17:58:11 ]</font>