Capture using USB vs. PCI

[muzman]

I am looking for buying video capture card (am a newbie too). What are the main pros/cons for having a USB capture cable (like Pinnacle Linx) vs. USB desktop device (like Dazzle) vs. PCI cards (like all others)?

Does USB connection limit the capture size/quality in some way? What about if I have USB 2.0 chipset on my mobo? It seems to me that "cable" solutions will capture raw video, while others would provide hardware compression, etc. Can anybody confirm that?

As you see I am looking for budget capture cards. I welcome any recommendations and information that will help me decide.

Thanks.

[muzman]

I forgot to tell you. I require analog video capturing. No DV for me yet.

Thanks again.

[spidey]

I use a Hauppage WinTV PCI - but to get good quality you must capture uncompressed.

I had a Dazzle DVC 1 USB - It worked very well if you capped at a high xVCD - I believe it capped out at 3000 Mpeg 1 Vid by 248 Mpeg 2 Audio - Realtime capping.

Drive space is an issue for uncpompressed stuff. 2 Hours = approx. 40 gig

[D_Knife]

If you have a USB 2.0 based mainboard you must use a USB 2.0 compatible capture device - otherwise the device will only use USB 1.1 speed and performance
I don't know of any USB 2.0 capture devices yet, only one scanner, a hard drive and a couple of CD Burners.
They will come out soon though...

[andrewb758]

I would wholeheartedly recommend a PCI-based capture solution. USB (at least 1.1) devices, in my experience, are, like you said, limited in size and quality of the capture. If your USB device does not have built-in audio facilities, then you must use the line-in of your sound device. This can cause lip-sync problems after about fifteen minutes. USB devices often use some sort of compression to fit the video on the limited bandwidth of USB 1.1, even if you are capturing uncompressed. I have an ATI TV Wonder PCI, and it works perfectly. It allows for uncompressed RGB capture (meaning their is no compression in the video whatsoever), but this is not often desirable. Usually you will want to use some sort of capture codec. I recommend PICVideo Motion JPEG. It does very nicely at 100% quality (setting of 20) and gives a bit rate of about 2.44 MB/sec. As D_Knife says, there is yet to be a USB 2.0-based analog capture solution. So for now, I would stick to PCI devices. The TV Wonder is budget, at least in my book. It was under $100. There is the VE version of this card, which is cheaper, but leaves stereo audio support and an S-Video jack, among other things. So if these are requirements, don't buy the VE version. The card claims to have real-time MPEG capture, which would lead you to believe that there is some sort of hardware support, but there is not. ATI has simply added real-time MPEG software capture to its Multimedia Center software, and the quality is horrid. As for capture size, this is only limited (usually) by the file system of your hard drive. FAT will allow files up to 2GB. FAT32 will allow 4GB. NTFS (found on Windows NT 4.0, 2000, and XP), for all intents and purposes, will allow a file as large as your hard disk permits. However, capturing using a quality compression codec, you should not run into too much trouble capturing up to about 20-30 minutes. As far as "raw" video from a cable, I don't know of any USB solution that doesn't compress the video in some way to fit it into the 12 Mbps of USB 1.1 bandwidth. I would stick with a PCI-based card not only because of superior quality, but because many are based on a chip series known as the BT8x8, which enjoys wide support from many independent and Linux developers. This means that you may be able to expand your card's capabilities beyond what is allowed by the included software, or to use your card in non-Windows environments. Hope I could help in some way.