Reccomendations for capture cards

[Craig Tucker]

I am looking for a cheap capture card for around the £50 mark. Must have a TV tuner, FM would be nice but not essential. Remote control, capture to DVD mpeg2 720x576, and also capture to uncompressed or Huffy AVI would be nice too.

I am considering the Compro Videomate TV gold Plus which I can get for £40, but I think it will only capture to mpeg1 or mpeg2, not AVI.

I welcome any suggestions.

[fmctm1sw]

What about those K-World cards? I see them all the time here (Japan) for about $80.

[Richard_G]

Pinnacle PC/TV stereo tuner card with remote control £39.99, see http://www.blankdiscshop.co.uk/acatalog/Hardware_Section__.html

[zilog_jones]

I've found the Hauppauge WinTV-PCI FM card really good. It was about 70 Euro in PC World here in Ireland, so I'd assume it'd be about £50 sterling.

It has a remote, NICAM stereo decoder, 720x576 (though download the latest drivers and WinTV2000 from their site for best results - the crappy old version on the CD didn't even do that resolution!), FM radio, very nice picture quality, and it works great through DScaler! You can select any of your installed codecs for recording (good results with Huffyuv), but I don't think you can record straight to MPEG2 - you might have to encode to huffyuv or something first then use TMPGEnc or CCE or something to convert it to MPEG2.

[pchan]

Hi Craig,

I have using the Compro Video Mate TV Gold plus for almost 6 months together with Showshifter. The card works well except for some issue with the the audio-in. The recorded sound tends to crack. I used the motherboard audio-in instead. It supports S3 standymode. I use it as a PVR and working well with schedule recording. I capture TV program to Divx format on a P4 3.0C.

Compare to Hauppauge WinTV2000, it's definite better.

[Craig Tucker]

Thanks for the replies guys. pchan, I am leaning towards the compro because of the record from standby mode and because the supplier I use stocks it. Do you know if it works with virtualdub and have you ever captured to avi uncompressed or using the huffyuv codec. Also have you ever had any audio sync problems capturing. What software do you use to capture direct to divx.

Thanks once again.

[pchan]

Hi Craig,

I use Showshift and it comes with Picvideo MJPEC codec and Divx codec. I used Divx. Sorry, I never try huffy and virtualdub. If you want to the remote that bundle with the card then you need to use the bundle tv software. I use Marmitek MouseRemote with Girder.

[pchan]

Never experience any audio sync issue.

[Craig Tucker]

Thanks pchan, I think i will give the card a try.