Best card for under 150$ ?? on a 533MHZ, 64 MB , 14 Gig HD

[phishdeadsci]

hey everyone, Im gettin ready to buy a capture card for my pavilion 6645C, and was wondering what would be the best one for me to get for under 150$, on a 533 MHZ,64 MB memory ?? I will mainly be using it for capturing DVD (this is possible, right??) VHS, and maybe a little TV..Thanks~John

[phishdeadsci]

also, i was wondering , i am only be capturing in mpeg1, will a 14 gig HD be adequate for capturing 1 movie/1vhs,etc at a time ? Thanks

[darkelf]

My personal opinion is to go with an AIW 128, either the 16meg or 32meg (depending on how important the gaming aspects are for you).

The do a *relatively* decent job doing caps of MPEG-1 and MPEG-2.

Nothing is as good as huffy-AVI (well uncompressed AVI I guess) for capture quality, with post-capture compression with TMPGenc/LSX/Panasonic encoder.

You should be able to get 1hr of VHS quality MPEG-1 to fit easily onto a 74min (700meg) CD. That should give you at least 8-9 hrs of MPEG-1 space on your drive with plenty of room for post-processing.

Assuming you are doing VCD captures? 1150Mbit VCD is roughly 1min per megabyte of space. So fitting 74mins on a CD is possible.

Since VHS is roughly 320x240, you can either capture at this or VCD rez (352x240) and get decent results.

Your current setup could definately use some more memory. 64meg in this day and age is substandard. You can pick up decent 128meg sticks for less than 50 bucks. I would invest in at least that much more memory before getting a new card.

In my experience lack of adequate memory has created many more headaches than capture-specific issues.

Looking back at your original post, your 533Mhz CPU might be pushing the limits for MPEG-1 on-the-fly caps with an ATI card. You might be better served with a more hardware-based solution. Something like a dazzle or possibly a Hauppauge WinDVR. The latter is kinda pricey ($210 ish), but I've heard that it works fairly well.

Would a hardware upgrade be in your future? A new motherboard and 1gig+ processor can be had for slightly more than $100.00.

Sorry for the novel, hope this helps.

[phishdeadsci]

hey man, thanks for the detailed reply. Ive been lookin at memory and I found found 256MB for like 60$, which I think im gonna get. my only question is, how hard is it to install ? Is it just like,take the old memory out, and slide the new mem in, then let plug and play do the rest ? or do i have to do all kinds of configuring and stuff ? ive installed a modem before, and a cd burner, so i guess i kinda know what im doin. But im totally in the dark when it comes to installing memory. Thanks! John

PS, can i have 2 memory cards at once, my cureent 64mg, and a 256mb ?

[DVWannaB]

Yes you can have 2 or more memory cards and is the easiest thing on your computer to install (that is if you can get yours hands in there). Some of these board manufacturers pick the strangest places to place the slots. Just slip it into the slot right beside your existing memory card and start her up.

As far as capturing DVD quality video.......foregt about it. Your system just will not be able to handle it. If you had lets say a 1.5 gig P4 processor, then it is more likely that you could achieve DVD capture. I have a P3 500 MHz 128 MB RAM and the best I can do is 352x480 MPEG2 in real-time. Good thing here is that the quality is great and Nero burns it as a compliant SVCD and plays well in the DVD player.

As far as capturing from VHS, I would suggest using VirtualDub with Huffyuv codec to capture as an AVI file. Why? Great quality and the ability to easily "touch-up" your capture and get rid of any lines or noise, etc. in the picture. If you have clean VHS, then real-time VCD or SVCD should be fine.

If you can, I suggest getting an extra hard drive, dedicated for video work.

[phishdeadsci]

thanks for the help, I think im ognna go with the 256MB memory now. I really dont mind about DVD quality, cause I will be capturing my friends DVD to mpeg1, and burning to VCD (i cant see paying 15-60$ for a dvd, when i can copy one for 15 cents with almost the same pic quality).I already ordered a capture card, its the "pixelview Play TV Pro" I read alot about it , and it seems to be a great card for the 50$ price tag (cant beat that) Peace~John

[beach]

just a quickie your system probably uses pc100 memory dont order pc 133 cos it might not work and wont mix with pc100 i know ive tryed it..

[fonoop]

I have pc 133 in sytem and it works fine even though my mobo only supports pc100. I think it clocks down to 100 or something like that.

[NeWcS]

thanks for the help, I think im ognna go with the 256MB memory now. I really dont mind about DVD quality, cause I will be capturing my friends DVD to mpeg1, and burning to VCD (i cant see paying 15-60$ for a dvd, when i can copy one for 15 cents with almost the same pic quality).I already ordered a capture card, its the "pixelview Play TV Pro" I read alot about it , and it seems to be a great card for the 50$ price tag (cant beat that) Peace~John

Are you only getting the card and upgrading so you can....."cause I will be capturing my friends DVD to mpeg1, and burning to VCD"?????

If so why dont you just get a DVD-Rom and rip your own DVD's??????


:P

[phishdeadsci]

Nah, Im getting the card to capture DVD's, and to transfer my parents VHs home movies to VCD

[Bstansbury]

Boy are you in for a surprise,... you are about to jump head first into a "Bottomless Pit of Video Capture",... and you don't know how or what kind of memory to put into your system.

Just a few words of advice,... your system is very marginal,... it would probably work ok,.. if you ever get to the point where everything is working,.. but by that time you'll be bitten by the "Quality bug",.. and you'll not be happy with your minimal video captures (and neither will your folks be impressed). So then you'll start all over and buy your self a new system that has the capability to really capture high quality full frame NTSC.

In your post you mentioned DVD twice, saying you want to "Capture DVD". Just how do you think this can be done. DVD disks are already digital data and in MPEG-2 format. You don't Capture that,... it is already Captured. All you need to do is "Rip it" from the DVD disk to your PC hard disk, and all this takes is a DVD R0M, like the post above said. Once you have it there, you can use several other programs to convert it to VCD's or SVCD's, but since you don't have a "NEW" DVD player, your's probably won't play VCD's or SVCD's,... so now what do you have,... nothing. As far as your folks VHS tapes,... they are probably better quality than anything you're going to get with a minimal system and 320x240 capture resolution of a vhs. Are you going to buy your folks a new DVD that can play VCD's and SVCD's? Will it look worse than there orginal VHS tapes.. boy will you look stupid.

I suggest that before you do any buying of anything, do a lot of reading on this forum, look at the "How To's" section,.. study up on Video Capture and find out what it takes to do a good job. The ask yourself, what is it you really want to do for the long term, not for the copy of one DVD or one VHS tape,... get a plan,... do it once and do it right.

Just trying to save you some future pain.

[phishdeadsci]

thanks bstanbury. I know my system is basically, slow and outdated, I am adding 256MB memory when i get the card, so i hope that should help a little ? I know dvd's can be ripped, but I dont have a dvd-rom drive, and i figured instead of buying one i could just hook up the dvd player to the capture card, and just capture it to a mpeg1 file, wont that work ?
Also, i do have a new dvd player, it plays vcd's perfect, just doesnt play SVCD's (damn).. I know im a newbie so basically im gonna try all this out, my parents are dumb and really cant tell the quality difference, as long as its just aobut as good as the VHS it will be fine. If im disapointed with the quality I will have just been out 50$, but I will still have the extra memory and the capilibilty to use the tv tuner, and fm tuner (not really what i bought it for tohugh). Maybe my next purchase will be a dvd-rom drive with cd-r..Thanks!

[phishdeadsci]

ok, so basically all I need to know is will my VHS captures be good/perfect with my 320 megs of ram, and 533 MHZ processor ? Thanks

[Bstansbury]

You can Capture a DVD out of your DVD player but you will be loosing a lot of resolution. I think the best you can get out of the DVD player is S-Video signal, but I don't know anything about your Pixelview TV pro capture card. Does it have S-Video input? I really doubt it since it only cost $50. The only other option would be Composite input, which will be basic TV quality,... because it IS a TV signal, interlace 640x480. It is not going to be any better that watching Cable TV,... maybe a little less noise, but the composite signal is suseptible to noise,... so???

The cost of a good DVD ROM is only about $50 and they come with software that will typically disable the Macrovision encryption software that is bundled with most DVD's. By the way, you won't be able to use the S-Video or Composite output of your DVD player to most cards because of the Macrovision encryption. You'll have to find a way to defeat that and it probably won't be at the Capture card. There is a site somewhere that can show you how to modify the Config. of some DVD players to defeat the Macrovision signal generated internally. The nice thing about DVD-ROM's is that they come with some capability to defeat the Macrovision signal if it is embedded in the DVD.

One last suggestion, check out the specification on your Motherboard and make sure before you buy memory, just how many and what kind of memory it will take. Some boards, as mentioned in other posts, won't let you mix the kind of memory or the speed. Your old system may have SDRam and they may be SIMM's or they may be DIMM's, and I know you can't mix those. If you get anything, I would suggest it be a 256 MB DIMM at PC 133 and if they won't mix, at least you have 256 MB of fast memory. Your MOtherboard BIOS may be capable of setting the front side buss to one speed (say 100 MBS) and also setting the memory clock speed to 133 MBS. This will give you more performance and 256 MB is sufficient memory to do good capture.

Hope this helps

[darkelf]

I see what you are going for. You want to get VCD'z of DVD'z *AND* have the ability to do VHS captures as well.

I wouldn't have thought of it, but your idea has some merit.

Tho the DVD-ROM drive can be found at many vendors on www.pricewatch.com for less than 50 buks. That's for a 16x speed too!

As long as you realize the quality reduction of using a capture device as opposed to ripping and converting the MPEG-2 video stream digitally (the analogue/dig conversion adds alot of unnecessary noise), the capture card should work fine for you. You will need a capture card for everything related to video with the exception of DVD and DV camcorders (FireWire is best option with them). So get the capture card and have fun with it.

The PC133/PC100 memory speed issue has the possibility of causing problems. It all depends on whether your board will work with PC133 if it reports support for only PC100. For the most part I have never had a problem with buying *faster* memory and using it in an older machine. I know that others have had problems, but you should be fine with this.

Since the VCR is limited in resolution, basically VCD quality already, a card that can cap these resolutions is a good option.

I agree with the others that taking the hit with diskspace/time capturing to a Huffy-AVI file and then converting to VCD using software encoder will give better quality than a direct MPEG-1 capture. I have a 1gig Athlon sitting in front of me and when I encode my VCD's (which are VHS captures thru composite, btw) I use TMPGenc with the quality setting on "Very High (extremely slow)". It will run on my machine (which also has 768meg DDR) at about .8x speed. I will wait the extra 45mins for each hour of video by using that highest setting. That is what batch processing is for! Your computer likes to work as you sleep!

I hope the forum-people don't mind the novella responses, but a decent capture card with either MPEG-1 direct capture or Huffy-AVI capture (in Virtualdub) are good options. I strongly suggest the latter, especially if you have diskspace and bandwidth to handle it.

Cheers.

[phishdeadsci]

ok, first off, THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO HELPED ME ON THIS. next, just one more question, I already have a cd-r/rw drive, but as I have a pavilion, there is not an extra space for antoher cd drive. Externals are alot more expensive, so what i was wondering, can I install an internal dvd drive outside of the computer, like just get cable extensions for the wires that plug into the drive , and just run them under the pc case, and to the outside, where i will connect the cd drive ? Ide imagi it would be possible if i had enough cable length, just wana make sure tohugh. Thanks!

[phishdeadsci]

sorry, just one more. Ive decided to use the huffyuv codec for my capturing, but i know avi's can be HUGE, and at most i usualy only have aobut 10 gigs free space on my pc, will this be enough for say a 1 hour huffied AVI ? with enough room left (probably not more than a gig) for encoding to mp1 ? Thanks

[darkelf]

Raw vcd is 352x240 at 24bit color (3 bytes per pixel), each frame is
253,440 bytes per frame.

per second (NTSC 29.97 fps): 7,595,596.8

per minute: 455735808

per 30min: 13,672,074,240 (13.6 gig)

per 60min: 27,344,148,480 (27.3gig/hr)

That is using RAW YUV.

My real-world results with caps at this resolution are roughly 34% of this maximum, or roughly 9,297,010,483.2 (9.3gig/hr) using the Huffy-AVI codec.

With your 14 gig drive, you should be able to cap at least 1 hour of huffy video, apply whatever filters and changes you wish, and frameserve it out to TMPGenc or other MPEG1 encoder to get the final product.

Your 10 gig estimation should be just enough.

For the external drive option, I would suggest either the new USB 2.0 enclosures that are out now (for 60 bucks usually) or a firewire box. The advantage of USB 2.0 is that it is *supposed* to work on standard USB 1.1 ports at the slower (12Mbps) speed.

The spec for IDE cable length is 36 inches from the controller to the last device. If you had a box sitting on top of your current case (or next to it on the workbench) you can use the IDE cable snaking out of the back of the machine. Since this is unshielded cable that is *NOT* for external machine use, you could see some strange errors that may be due to this method.

I realize you are on a budget (keeping the pavillion and all) but a new case for 40 bucks with more drive bays would probably be a better option than using bare IDE outside the machine.

If you could afford a firewire card (40 bucks) and a firewire external case (also for around 60 bucks), you could help future-proof your setup. Any new machine you buy in the future will be able to take advantage of USB 2.0 or firewire if you have the adapter card. The throughput is generally enough for most light/medium bandwidth tasks.

Hope this helps...

[tivojoego]

First off - let me say I have both alot and very little experience with capture cards

How can that be? Simple I haverecently purchased and returned products from both ATI and Dazzle and had nothing but problems.

I then noticed a Pinnacle Bungee on sale at COMP USA - even though I had been warned
NEVER
NEVER
NEVER
expect to get reasonable results with video capture wiht a USB port - well I am here to tell everyone you was WRONG

The Bungee R O C K S
it RT codes MPEG2 and will also burn off a SVCD or DVD (depending on equipment) The product works fantastic no dropped frames great quality and all on a USB 1.1 Dell laptop!!!!!!! :P

Also supplies a breakout box for s-video or composite and a 75 ohm cable jack as it is also a TV/Cable Tuner - got the whole package for $240 - I know a little out of your range but no audio video sysnc no inturrupt conflicts literally plug and play.

Embaressed to say that I burned an SVCD last night and I "think" it works because I do not know how to play SVCD off a InterDVD player on my dell and my windows media player gets mad when I point it to the burned SVCD.

Anyone have any SVCD playback tips?