WinTV250 PVR(PCI) encoders?

[b_rad]

I was wondering if anyone knows of any encoders (if that's what they're called) that work with the WinTV cards. I want to be able to capture in formats other than mpeg2. I use Pinnacle Studio Plus 9 to edit and it's capture mode does not work with the card for some reason???

Thanks

[BrainStorm69]

A WinTV PVR can only capture in mpeg-2 format. It's hardwired -- ie, the encoder is embedded in the chip on the card.

[yoda313]

Hello,

Ditto.

The wintv pvr 250 is MPEG only. That is what it was made for. And it does this very well. But nothing else. It's just for easy high quality mpeg captures for vcd/svcd/dvd. No more, no less.

Kevin

[FulciLives]

One option that some people do with these cards ...

Capture at 15,000kbps which is the highest video bitrate these cards are capable of.

This will give you a very high quality capture that can be re-encoded with a software MPEG-2 encoder so you can edit beforehand then do a true multi-pass VBR MPEG-2 encode.

But eventhough 15,000kbps is very high for the MPEG-2 format (at standard DVD resolution) it still is not a lossy capture unlike using say HuffyUV via an AVI capture. However this "trick" does seem to work well since although the capture is not "lossless" it still is very high quality without any compression artifacts, at least not to even the best of human eyes.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
These only capture MP2 audio with 384kps being the max bitrate. I think the internal models (like the 250/350 models) have a hack that allows PCM WAV audio on capture but I've heard that doing that hack and keeping A/V sync is near impossible.

[b_rad]

Thanks everyone! That helps