Capture Card vs Tuner Card

[kelemvor]

I have some really old VHS-C tapes that I want to put on DVD for the in-laws. I have a Hauppauge 150MCE card in my Media computer that I guess would theoretically work to just play the takes in a VCR and then using the coax cable to go out from the VCR to the Tuner card and just have it record channel 3 right?

I also have an old AverMedia card that's just a capture card with a yellow RCA Video input. For that I'd obviously have to connect the video through there and the audio through the sound card and record that way.

Which would most likely give me the best results?

[edDV]

Use the PVR-150 mce.

Coax no. Poor quality.

Use composite (yellow) and audio (red/white RCA).

Record VHS-C at ~8000 to 9000 Kb/s CBR.

Don't toss or erase the tapes.

[TwistedLincoln]

I agree with edDV -- not only is coax lesser quality, but you will end up with mono audio, and lose any Dolby Prologic encoding that might have been present in the original recordings. Use composite.

[kelemvor]

Well actually I hadn't looked at my card for so long, I forgot it also has S-Video and the y/r/w jacks in it too.
http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_pvr150mce.html

So I guess I can just use that card. So now I just need to figure out if I should just record it using SageTV since that's already setup or if I should use something else. I guess I'll have to do some experimenting

[jman98]

Well actually I hadn't looked at my card for so long, I forgot it also has S-Video and the y/r/w jacks in it too.
http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_pvr150mce.html

So I guess I can just use that card. So now I just need to figure out if I should just record it using MythTV since that's already setup or if I should use something else. I guess I'll have to do some experimenting

S-Video will be better for video quality than the composite yellow cable. By the way, since you are running MythTV you obviously have a PC running Linux. You should ALWAYS mention that when you ask for help because most of us around here run Windows. I work as a Unix system administrator and I have no love for Windows, but I run it at home because honestly it's just easier to do what I want to do with video and audio in Windows. I don't know what other options you might have other than MythTV, but you might as well just use MythTV. Hauppauge cards use a chip on the card for encoding, so using a different software program won't make the encodes any better unless one program has some weird restrictions (ie. can't record anything above a bit rate of 4500 Kbps) that another doesn't have.

[kelemvor]

OOPS. My bad. Meant SageTV, not MythTV. Was just reading an article on Myth and had it on my brain I guess.

[edDV]

If your VHS-C camcorder has S-Video out use that instead of composite. Usually only SVHS-C camcorders have S-Video outputs.