Questions About Using the old Canopus DVRex capture card

[audioresearch]

I have a Canopus DVRex system installed in a Dell PC running Windows 7. The capture quality is absolutely excellent and it never looks worse than the original source material.

The problem is that so far I have not found a way to get the DVRex to output to files that anything else can play. Right now, I can only play those files using the DVRex card itself. When I tried to have the DVRex card use its own software to output to an mpeg file, that simply crashed on Windows 7. Maybe as a last resort I could load Win XP or if necessary even Win 98 to one of my old computers and maybe then the DVRex could output to an mpeg file do you think?

I did find software called the "Canopus Converter" from Canopus but so far it fails to convert DVRex reference files to anything that will universally play.

Does anyone know of anything besides Canopus capture cards(DVRex, DV Raptor, etc) that can play the DVRex output files? The specific type of DVRex output file I'd like to be able to play universally is what is called a "reference" file that allows video captures of up to about 3 hours and 4 minutes long.

If there is something that plays these files or that would convert them to something universal such as avi or mp4 or mkv file types, that would be really great.

Thanks for any help.

[dellsam34]

DV is only good on a computer screen, once you blow that on a big TV screen you'll start to notice the compression artifacts and color smear, DV is not the best capture format out there and even worse trying to convert it to another ancient compressed format like MPEG-2, You will be far better capturing lossless and encode to H.264.

[audioresearch]

Thanks! I did not know that DV was that bad. I'll stay away from it.