Video capture card - help

[sphinx99]

I guess I'm going to need a new video capture card. Previous projects, I used some Theater 550 based card. It was PCI, came with s-video input, and I did a bunch of SVHS, Hi8, Video8, etc. with it. Getting it working was a bit of a pain, but I somehow pulled through with Virtualdub as the receiver and Lagarith as the codec. I don't mind going that route again.

BUT... the PC I used it with has since been retired. Now I have a fancy i7 workstation with PCI Express slots, running 64-bit Windows 7. I'm not even sure where that Theater 550 card went. So I guess I need something new.

I don't mind taking the same approach (Virtualdub, Lagarith) since I recorded close to a thousand hours with it. Is there a card that works with W7 64-bit and a modern PCI-e i7 box? I know it took about 6 months of headache and heartache before ATI finally kicked out a driver that made the 550 sing... and even then it was a sad song because none of the video processing features advertised with the card ever worked. From what little I've read, the 650 and 750 continue the reputation as largely unsupported junk but nevertheless remain the only options short of the Blackmagics...

[sphinx99]

I see a number of Theater 650-based cards at the local Microcenter. Some are PCI, some are PCI Express, and all appear to have a s-video input. Is it fair to say that these cards will do uncompressed capture like my 550-based card used to? And, does anyone know about Winodws 7 support (preferably 64-bit) for these platforms?

ATI's website suggests that the 550 simply will never work with W7 and the 600/650 only sometime in the next few months. 750 drivers are available but the card does not appear to be for sale in the US.

[jagabo]

This thread has lots of discussion about the 650/750 based cards:
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/313735-Capture-card-for-Laserdisc-and-VHS-Good-card-quality

[sphinx99]

The impression I got from that thread was that the 650/750 are really good ADCs with the same crappy software support from four years ago.

[danno78]

I suggest you install Windows XP or Vista on another hard disk and on startup choose XP when you need to capture videos. I assume you at least one PCI slot on the motherboard. Theatre 550 is verry close to 650 in term of quality.

[sphinx99]

I bought an ATI TV Wonder HD750. It's an external USB device. Manufacturer - Diamond. Near as I can tell, it's letting me capture what I'm looking for, although I seem to be having some frame dropouts that I need to troubleshoot. (This is an i7 at ~ 4GHz writing to four Intel X25Ms in a RAID 0 stripe - I think my workstation is not the bottleneck.)

[danno78]

Have you read this

Don`t tick Enable Audio Playback during capture because you get dropped frames

from this thread indicated by jagabo?