Dazzle headaches...

[DrDoak]

I recently purchased a Dazzle Digital Video Creator USB, because I have video on both VHS and a digital video camera that I wanted to capture, edit, and output back to VHS.

Unfortunatly, I bought this without first doing my homework (beat head against wall, repeat). The Digital Video Creator only supports MPEG-1 encoding, and there is also the argument whether the USB is holding the video back or not. I've never had problems capturing (besides it only being MPEG-1), but I have had a few problems outputting to VHS, like the screen jumping, and sometimes blacking out for a few seconds at a time.

I'm leaning towards buying a Dazzle DVC II, the one that has the PCI card, because it supports MPEG-2, it'll still work for both DV and analog, as well as outputting to VHS. Does anyone have any experience or knowledge as to how well these things work? Or should I go with a different product?

I've got a 1200 mhz t-bird, 256 MB RAM, ATI 64 MB DDR Radeon, an ATI TV-Wonder Pro, and a SB Live! Platinum 5.1...

[species8472]

I purchased my DVC II a month ago and am very happy with it. I have used it to record mpg2 in dvd and svcd format from vcr, live tv and the s-video output from my Hollywood Plus DVD card. The quality results are dependant on the input quality. The mpg2 resulting from the Hollywood Plus capture was excellant. I previously owned a wintv, pctv, and an ATI All In Wonder card. For me, the DVCII results are better than any other card I have owned. I think my captures are better than results of "Virtual Dub AVI and TMPGenc encodes"; with far less effort and time involvement.
Go to http://stop.at/dazzle2 the unofficial dazzle forum for further information.

[patb]

Just to validate your findings,
I also had a wintv pvr, ati, and dazzle. The wintv produced a horrible waveform that can be seen on some good mpeg analyzers. The bit and q rate were to unstable to produce anything workable. I determined it was their choice of chip set and hardware implementation. The dazzle uses the c-cube chip set which is an industry standard for pro and semi pro encoding and shows on the analyzer. The reason I continued to stray from the dazzle was features. The wintv pvr was a great vcr, but I couldn't take the output anymore. I then discovered twnh shareware for dazzle and now I have vcr control over the recording and better than the wintv had. This put me back in love with the dazzle. The only issue left is changing the channel on my cable box to coincide with the time I want to record. I will figure that out eventually.