Creative Labs Video Blaster Digital VCR?? Opinions

[Carlos C]

In the capture card comparison section I read a positive reveiw of this card, but am skeptical since there was only one reader comment. It's a relativley inexpensive card. I was just wondering if it's any good for capturing VHS video for VCD or SVCD?? Anyone have any experience with this product? Thanks in advance.

[Dano]

A friend of mine wrote that review. He actually had the card before it was publicly released. I trust his judgement. He rated it a 10- I don't know why it came out a 7.9. He is going to bring in a copy of the quality to me on Wed.
This is real-time MPEG2 without any artifacts! I'll keep you posted

[M&M]

I got the same question as Carlos. I have been looking for a good TV tuner and capture card for a while. The VB Digital VCR sound really good. Dano, does your friend works for Creative Labs? Have you heard anything from him yet?

Thanks.

[Barnabas]

I bought one of these cards about 3 weeks ago. Here is the good and bad news about the card.

The good news is that the card does a great job of capturing. It records mpeg2 in VBR on the fly with GREAT quality. The bad news is that although the card does support 480 x 480 mpeg2, it only records audio in 32 or 16 KHz rather than 44.1 KHz so the files won't play as is in a DVD player. I have tried many times to de-mux and convert the audio to 44.1 and re-mux back, but I always loose audio sync by about 30 into the capture. The only way to use the files to burn to a SVCD and keep sync so far that I have found is to re-encode them again in TMPGenc.

The files created by the Digital VCR must be run through Creative's convert utility so they can be viewed outside of the VCR program at all. Unfortunately, Creative has some MAJOR bugs in the conversion utility. We are supposed to be able to set any conversion size, but anything over 2047 megs in size will create not 1 large file, but hundreds of small files all over the place. I have notified Creative about this bug, but have not heard back from them. Also, there are times when after capturing something that I lose color and have to reboot.

Anyone wanting a capture card for time shifting, like a TIVO unit, would like this card, but unless Creative makes it possible to record 44.1 audio as well, this is not a good card for SVCD capturing.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Barnabas on 2002-01-06 19:31:19 ]</font>

[buecker]

I was suppose to send mine back today. Forgot the box at home. Dammit.

Anyways I was really unimpressed with the tuner and that I couldn't open my converted mpeg files in any editing programs.

Not only do they send me dead batteries for the remote, the tuner stopped working after 2 days.

I am sending it back because I can find better ways to spend $100.

[Carlos C]

Thanks alot for your replies guys. I've made up my mind and decided to spend the dough towards something else.