VHS Capture on a laptop with USb capture card and external d

[palvsntsc]

Hi chaps,

I want to capture both PAL and NTSC VHS to DVD on a laptop. I have a budget of say $1700 for a laptop and will buy an external USB hard drive for capturing (picked that up from this site!).

Now the laptop will have at least two USB ports one for the external hard drive and one for the capture card. I’ve got a budget of $300 to spend on the capture\PBR card.

Has anyone on this forum done this before and have any recommendations on cards in particular but also laptops and hard drives? I’d like PVR functionality on the capture card if at all possible too. My main concern here is quality of capture and it’s audio as some of the captures will be old music videos.

Most captures will be an hour, I’d like to edit out the commercials. Some however will be two hours but I suppose I could split them over a couple of DVDs.
Thanks in advance.

[redwudz]

I would use a Firewire external drive instead. If you have USB capture and run the USB external HD at the same time, may be problems. Hopefully not.

Many laptops have Firewire built in, but if not, a PCMCIA Firewire card is inexpensive. An external HD with both USB 2.0 and Firewire connections would be the best choice and give you more options.

I use a ADVC-100 to 'capture' to my laptop occasionally using a PCMCIA Firewire card. I haven't used USB capture cards.

Also, if you plan to do extensive editing, you might want to cap in AVI format. MPEG is harder to edit and easier to have sync problems with the audio. Of course with AVI you have to encode, and that takes time.

[upshot]

I've been quite happy with the ati usb2 wonder... It does a nice job displaying and capturing on my laptop. Your going to need some CPU power with this external unit since most of the compression is done realtime on your system. I'd shoot for a P4 2.8 or better.