why always ATI's AIW?????

[billson]

Please keep in mind when reading this, if there are specific differences in the specs of the different cards, Im a newbie and havent understood them.

Can someone please explain to me why the GeForce Cards never get recommended for video capture? So many of them are equipped with Video In/TV Out functions, and to me (someone that has never captured a thing in his life) the software bundle looks ok with most of them, so.... is their capture quality just total rubbish?? I dont understand why no-one seems to use them.

Where I live, theyre cheaper to buy, and I dont play games much so I just want something thats going to capture very well. I do not want to get an AIW 7500 before I hear what people think of the GeForce 2Ti's capture ability. I was looking at this one in particular:

http://www.msi.com.tw/products/multimedia/vga/spec/8836.htm

Does anyone have it that can share their view?
Or can anyone point me to a link with some relevant info. Thanks :)

[Betamax]

You say it yourself, you're a newbie.
The card you spoke about is of MSI. MSI has a 'bad' reputation of capturing hardware. Even their motherboards are not recomended if one would like to build a capturing system (most capture-boards wont work in MSI).

I red at their site, they have a 'S-VHS IN' - are you sure it's for capturing? Inform your-self good before to buy it. I saw nothing about capturing at this page of them so I wouldn't buy it at all.
But it's your money, you've got to do with it what you want.

If you've already a VGA-card (and your system's performance is good enougs, say at least a P-II at >=800Mhz, fast and large disks and lots of RAM) then you don't need to buy a new VGA card.
There exists also PCI-cards dedicated for capturing, it will save you money. Even ATI has those types of cards.

For example you could inform you at the site of Canopus, they offer capture-dedicated cards (no vga-included) which prices are not so high.

[billson]

well i found an msi forum where ppl were discussing about their capturing using these cards so..yeah ppl use them for capture. However, after reading a few of them... they agree with you...MSI is pretty poor. So, i will be staying away from them.

At the moment I dont have anything, so Im starting with a clean slate... Im about a week away from getting a P4 1.8A w/ 512MB DDR Ram, HDs will either be 2X40Gig Maxtor or 1x80Gig Seagate. This should be a good enough system to set myself up to capture with. So Im just trying at this stage to figure out the best way to go as far as capture cards...wether to get a stand alone or an AIW. Price wise I dont want to go any higher than what an AIW 7500 would cost. But like everyone, I want the best quality for the money.

[Anonymous65]

ATI AIW is one of the few cards that has the capture chip and the VGA engine on the same card. Most capture applications require Overlay mode for video capture, and this can only be done when the capture chip and VGA chip is on the same card. No PCI BT8x8 card can do Overlay mode on full frame video captures. So, if you want to capture video at higher reolustions, then ATI AIW is almost the only option there is to get a capture card that will support hardware overlay mode.

There are other modes like Preview and DIB DRAW for VFW, and TEE Filter for WDM. However, most capture programs does not use this option and will not work with a standard PCI BT8x8 card.

[Allan55]

Hi,

My Asus V8200 (GeForce 3) has video-in and capture. Looking at the hardware it should be able to do great captures. But the drivers and other software are brain-dead. They work but not for high-res and high quality.

Colour me more than @#@%^!^!#%$@$#.
Asus, nVidia -- are you listening?

I tried a Radeon 7500 AIW and couldn't get it to work on a clean install of Win98SE and WinXP and not much else (I have 30+ years in computers and generally can get anything to work assuming that it actually does work).

I don't believe any "integrated with video card" capture device produces high quality. And after many years of experience with ATI, I don't trust them to support their own hardware all that well either.

I finally bought a Hollywood DV Bridge (Now I'd give a serious look at the Canopus ADVC100 as well)

USB devices based on USB 1.x don't seem to have the

Copied and edited from a previous post:
My major decision points for the external Hollywood DV Bridge are:

High quality capture (including audio in one device--no sync problems). This is beyond what I need now but maybe I won't have to upgrade so soon.

The Bridge is a completely external device; therefore no motherboard compatibility issues which seem to exist for the 'Digital Video Creator II' and maybe others (this appears to be true; it's been plugged-into 2 different VIA chipset MBs (KT133A and KT266A and works fine). Both MBs use no-name firewire cards with Texas Instruments -26 chips. My friend's is also plugged-into VIA motherboards.

Longer life (no special drivers) because it "looks like" a digital camera on a firewire port (I hope).

This wasn't a decision point when I bought the DV Bridge but... I've put another firewire card in a second computer and I can capture and process on two boxes with one (expensive) capture device.

To my mind, external is the only way to go.

Allan

[Craig Tucker]

Alan.

You say you tried an AIW 7500 and could'nt get it to work, perhaps you did have a duff card, as there are hundreds of people on this forum who use their AIW's for capture, including myself (winXP).

As for quality it all depends on your source and the format you capture in, I can make VCD's from a cable TV source that look better than a VHS recording.

Craig

[Bschuler]

ATI has many years of development in their capture cards... Why go with a late arrival? ATI cards are way ahead of anything out there at the moment...Nuff said..

P.s. Setting them up isn't easy. But once you do, the quality is very impressive, the abilities are amazing, and the card itself is revolutionairy.

[Nelson37]

I don't know about revolutionary, but ATI cards are consistently of good quality (by that I mean they work right out of the box, every time).

Their driver and software setup can be a bit tricky but no worse than many other cards that don't do as much.

Many complain about slow driver updates but updates get a lot slower when the company goes out of business, ATI has been here 15 years or more.