??? Best Capture Card Under $100 for SVCD ... DC 10+ ???

[bbb]

I'm aiming to back up my VHS collection to SVCD.

The Pinnacle DC 10+ looks like the best choice for my price range. I hear it can be hacked into a Pinnacle DC 30 with the DC 30 drivers. And I hear it can capture up to 640 x 480 at 30 fps with Virtual Dub and later encoded into MPEG with TMPGENC with good results.

However, will it function well without dropping too many frames using my spare K6-3 400 (running at 366) processor and 64 Megs of ram? Does the DC 10+ run well on my lower end system. Does it make real good captures? or only if I capture to lossless AVI first?

[Anonymous65]

I don't know anyhting about making it into a Pro30, but the DC10+ is a hardware m-jpeg capture card at up to 640x480. So, the card does the labor during capture, not your PC.

I have tried the card, but I did not like the quality of the video. Even at 640x480 the video was without detail, sharpness and crispness. It looked like a good VHS copy to me. A cheap TV tuner card for $20 can capture video with higher sharpness and crispness at lower resolutions, but you need a lot of processing power to do so. I have a 1000 Mhz P3, and I can hardly do 480x480 without dropping frames.

There is also a Matrox TV card that has onboard hardware m-jpeg capture at 640x480, but I do not know what video quality it has. I have used the Dazzle DVC2, and in 640x480 mode Mpeg-2, I did not see any degregation in the video signal when recording from digital satellite or DVD. The recorded video looked identical to the live video. That is how good 640x480 records should look like. (even when satellite and DVD is 720x480) But, at $300 the Dazzle is expensive, and the software sucks.

SK

[bbb]

Your experience makes me feel so poor and helpless.

Is there anyone who has success with DC 10+ in making nice SVCD? I can't afford anything else.

[Vejita-sama]

Just in case you haven't already looked there are reviews of captures cards on this site (look at the links to the left).

[Racoty]

I have a amd thunderbird 850mhz 256meg ram 40gig ultra100 hd. and a dc10+ card. whenever it works it does a great job capturing at 320x240 and 640x480. you can not capture at 480x480 unless you use virtualdub even then your picture is cut off on right side so you are not getting the full capture. And when you go to encode it takes a very long time. I replaced the dc10+ with a wintvgo for around $50.00 and had better luck with it than with the dc10+.
I hope this helps.

[bbb]

Does the picture get cut off only if you use 480 x 480? I had planned to capture at 640 x 480 and then resize/reencode with TMPGENC to 480 x 480.

Previously, I had only heard good things from using VirtualDub with DC 10+. Is there anyone else having this right margin cut off problem?

[legman]

That card sucks. So does the company, the software and the support. My box said windows 2000 right on it, then they told me on the phone, after a 45 minute wait, that they don't support win2k. It dropped frames left and right.

Bottom line, if you really want top notch captures, grab the wintvgo(50.00usa), use a p4 1.7ghz cpu with 500meg pc800 ram (intel 850gb board, cpu and fan 511.00 usa) and cap to huffy.

I do 640 x 480 @ 29.976fps to huffy to svcd now with that configuration using tmpgenc and vfapi and cce.

The quality is better then a 12 gran zapex card. I have seen them and they are good, but if you have to edit anything, you are pretty much screwed. You really need to transcode the the clips and then you loose quality. This actually does a slightly better job, although you will need about 60 gig to store a 2 hour cap and more room to edit things before encoding it. The quality is better, just the process is a bit slower. The pros always edit their movies in a lossless codec such as huffy or uncompressed mov, shouldn't you?

PS. The trick to setting up your project in tmpgenc is to select

SuperVideoCD (NTSC).mcf template
keep aspect ratio 2
4:3 525 line NTSC

This will give you the full 640 x 480 at full screen

Please note that you can get lost on this setting as some puters have codecs installed that would give you a true aspect ratio based on incorrect project settings. They are smart. If you want the correct aspect on a typical hardware player, like the hollywood plus or a stand alone, use those settings above and you will not only have full screen at correct aspect, but it is like animorphic encoding.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: legman on 2001-07-29 20:27:52 ]</font>

[Racoty]

the cut off capture only happens when capturing 480x480 it captures fine in 640x480

[bbb]

Maybe I can buy someone's DC 10+ cards. I might just use 352x240 and capture uncompressed avi. I'm too poor at the moment to get a new computer or a 60 gig harddrive.

If I find that the quality is average or below, I'll just ebay it.