For capturing Hi-8's better, should I buy a newer card than EyeTV 250 Plus?

[alex1]

I have the EyeTV 250 Plus that I bought quite some time ago.

I'm trying to capture all my old family video's from Hi8 but the problem is I get artefacts and blocks when the camera moves quickly.
I tried to use the most CPU-intensive settings for capturing but it didn't help.

The analog quality I see inside my camcorder's internal screen is WAY better than what I get on my EyeTV (using a Macbook Pro i7 2.5GHz Quad-core Late 2011).

Should I buy a newer capture video card, and which one should I buy?

This may sound like a noob question, but does capturing quality improve with newer video card models when it comes to capturing old Hi8 tapes?

[jagabo]

In general, newer standard definition capture devices are not better than older ones. In fact, it's much the opposite. The best devices were made ~15 years ago and with the influx of $10 capture devices from China it's been a race to the bottom since then.

If the highest bitrates your device gives you still produces blocky artifacts there's nothing you can do since it uses a hardware MPEG encoder. The best captures are with devices that capture uncompressed or losslessly compressed, YUV video. After capturing you edit and compress the video with the final delivery codec (typically MPEG 2 or h.264) where the CPU can spend as much time as necessary to deliver better quality.

Regarding the picture quality on the camcorder's screen: keep in mind that it's a tiny display. SD video will naturally look sharper on a 3 inch screen compared to full screen on a 20+ inch monitor. If you watch the captured video in a window that's the size of the camcorder's display it will probably look just as sharp. The camcorder display probably pumps up the contrast and saturation too. You could do the same thing on the computer if you wanted.