Good Analog Capture Card?

[LanceSteel]

I think I've asked this question before (kind-of)...

I'm looking to purchase a new capture card that has composite and S-Vid inputs and is also compatable with virtualdub.

I've read through the "user commented" capture cards list but the majority of cards have severly conflicting ratings. Does anyone have any suggestions? I don't want anything too cheap but it doesn't have to top-of-the-line either. Also, does anyone know of an online web retailer that is reliable and has a large selection of capture cards to choose from?

Thanks for all your help.

[Tbear]

I have the ATI AIW Rage 128 pro 32Mb AGP. It will work with Vdub and other capture programs. If you follow the guide on this site to set it up it will work good. It can capture in AVI, Mpeg 1 and 2. Mpeg is software encoded not hardware. There are some problems with it as with any capture card. There's several versions of the multimedia center out. It comes with ver 7.1, I'm using ver 7.6. and there is a regedit tool by Stinky
availiable in the tool section. I am happy with it.

[Nelson37]

I agree with Tbear. One tidbit, the MPEG capture on ATI cards is "hardware-assisted". As I recall, there is like a 16-bit buffer or some such on the card, don't know what difference this makes, but I get good results.

I also notice I read on the real-time devices, Dazzle and others, glowing reviews but then almost all say that real-time occassionally craps up and for best quality, record at hi bitrate and then re-encode. That's what I do with the ATI.

[Craig Tucker]

I have just upgraded from the 128 pro to the hercules AIW7500, which is basically a badged ATI card. The graphics performance is so much better.

Craig

[LanceSteel]

Thanks for all the input but I guess I should have said that I wanted a PCI capture card (I currently like my nvidia AGP card.) I kind of looking at the happague and pinnacle cards. Does anyone know of a reputable retailer or have any recommendations for either company's line of capture cards?

[CMP1223]

I just bought the pinnacle studio deluxe and am waiting for arrival. This card is PCI and has an analog breakout box that connects to firewire. All captures fixed at DV quality and is NOT compatible with virtualdub (I thought I heard somewhere that there was 3rd party software?) This is the best way to go for me because i have a big harddrive and it is always better to convert down in quality. Since I am a student, I got it cheap from a academic retailer. See the PC MAg review. Comes w/ Pinnacle Studio 7. Seems like the best analog capture solution.

CMP