My experience with the PV-256C

[asprinwizard]

I just thought I'd share my experiences of this card, for the benefit of those who are toying with buying one. I bought mine direct from the company. It arrived in record time but I had to pay £36 import tax (not the fault of Provideo of course). I took it home, installed it, installed all the software. Performance was good, but DVD and SVCD captures were somewhat blocky and DVD captures were very jerky. However VCD captures were good even when capturing sport action (notoriously blocky when I used my ATI All in Wonder). However either the software or the driver are so full of bugs it's not funny.

Version 1.3 comes with the card and the software captures in DVD mode half the time, even if VCD is selected. 1.4 is an improvement, but still unstable. Then Provideo put the new 1.7 drivers on the site. I got hold of them and tried them. the software seemed no better than 1.4, and the driver seemed to offer similar quality. I did however notice that AV sync was not as tight as it might be. Audio seemed to drift in and out.

By now I was getting quite annoyed so I installed the Aviosys drivers and software. Everything seemed much more stable. The software looked much better. However when I pressed record it seemed to be recording, but no file was saved when I stopped the recording. I then tried Provideo software with the Aviosys drivers. This seemed the best yet. So I started capturing a film from VHS to VCD. It worked so well until 56 minutes when it froze the computer.

Obviously very angry I ripped the card out of my system (removing it from control panel first of course). I then tried to use my AIW 128 to capture the same film. The TV program crashed (Blue Screen).

I have now re-installed all the drivers, software and Direct X and it seems to be working again (touch wood).

However the card did give me better results when it did work and I am reluctant to send it back to Taiwan. But it seems so unstable and it seemed to mess with AIW128. I could never capture more than 56 minutes before it crashed. If anyone has any solutions to the problems listed in this post please let me and everyone else know. What is the rule regarding IRQ? For a while it was sharing with the AIW, but I then moved it. It didn't seem to affect it either way.

Any ideas welcome. I guess the quality of VCD capture with the AIW will not be improved with a faster processor. How does the AIW 128 capture VCD? All I want at the end of the day is good quality VCD captures with no buggy software. Is that too much to ask?

[geniv]

I had the PV256T and to tell ya the truth the driver or program is pretty unstable and buggy.

in my case it runs better under W2K (actually it won't run on my win9 but then again both my O/S is bloated with hardware and software.

but that didn't stop the light of the Snazzi, DVCII or DVR from working..

anyway if you can get the PV256 to work, capture is VERY good quality. I did a 4 min 6meg DVD capture and it's PERFECT. really hard for me to tell the difference btw: a DVD and the capture out put to TV

but then dman, the crappy driver and software