DUMB newbie capture questions...

[fmctm1sw]

I want to get into the video capture scene. I have a slow PC (celeron 400) and I am going to buy a 20 or 30 GB hard drive. I am on a budget and don't have big bucks to throw at this. I want to capture video from my satellite reciever and VCR. I really don't care how long it takes me to covert and burn the stuff. I loved reading the capture card reviews but I can't see it anymore. I need a PCI capture card for under $200 (under $100 even better). I get the feeling that capturing an AVI and converting with (TMPGEnc??) gets the best results but takes forever. I was looking at Osprey 200 cards. What card can I get that will capture stuff that I can convert with TMPGEnc (which I understand is very good)?

[diviwadhwa]

DAZZLE DVC 80 USB does an ok job..and it costs <$70.

[Anonymous65]

You have two choices, a PCI AVI capture card or a PCI/USB capure card/box with an internal hardware encoder.

The AVI capture card is cheap, like $50. The hardware cards are more expensive, like $150 and up. Also, what format are you going to capture? VCD only. DVD only?

For VCD only, I would get a PV-231 or PV-233 card, a "cheap" mpeg-1 hardware card. For DVD and SVCD captures, go with a WinTV PVR-250.

Remember, cheap USB devices will only capture video up to 320x240 at a very high compression rate. They are not usable for SVCD or DVD creation.

[fmctm1sw]

You have two choices, a PCI AVI capture card or a PCI/USB capure card/box with an internal hardware encoder.

The AVI capture card is cheap, like $50. The hardware cards are more expensive, like $150 and up. Also, what format are you going to capture? VCD only. DVD only?

I would like to capture mpeg-2. I know, I'm asking a lot. I know to steer clear of the USB stuff. So an AVI card is not a hardware encoder? Not good, I heard horror stories about software encoders (blocky, choppy, etc..). For "div", yeah, I think I saw those DVC 80's at Radio shack for like $80.

[Anonymous65]

Real-time software encoders are poor, but software encoders (not real time) are the best in quality. But, it might take 4 hours to encode one hour of video. AVI is usually uncompressed video and needs tons of space and a fast hard drive.

For mpeg-2 captures, the cheapest high quality hardware card is the WinTV PVR-250 fro $150. Otherwise, go with a cheap AVI capture card, lots of hard drive space, and software non-realtime encoder.

[fmctm1sw]

Real-time software encoders are poor, but software encoders (not real time) are the best in quality. But, it might take 4 hours to encode one hour of video. AVI is usually uncompressed video and needs tons of space and a fast hard drive.

For mpeg-2 captures, the cheapest high quality hardware card is the WinTV PVR-250 fro $150. Otherwise, go with a cheap AVI capture card, lots of hard drive space, and software non-realtime encoder.

Ok, great. Let's see if I got this straight. I can capture my video (and audio) with a cheap PCI AVI card and use TMPGEnc to convert it to a MPEG2 file (or MPEG1) and burn a DVD (a short one with my CD RW) or a (s)vcd? I guess I should go with a 7200 RPM 40GB hard drive. Are all PCI AVI capture cards pretty much the same?

[fmctm1sw]

I've been doing a lot of reading in the capture section. It looks like the AVI capture process is going to make gigantic files that are limited apparantly to (2 or 4 GB?). My 40GB hard drive doesn't even look like it will be able to get a hour and a half movie in AVI (I'd like max res full D1?). How about the best of both worlds? What card (cheap) can capture AVI and has hardware MPEG compression?

[Dave B]

The GB limit only applies to Windows FAT32 filesystems. If you are using Windows NT, 2000 or XP then you can format your drive as NTFS and capture files as large as you like. If you are unable to use NTFS then you can still get by the filesize limits by using a capture program which captures in seamless multiple files (i.e. Once the first file has reached the limit it will automatically start capturing to a second file). VirtualDub and AVI_IO are both capable of this.

Secondly, an uncompressed AVI capture process does make gigantic files and few of us can afford the sort of disk size required to store a long length of video. Many people use the HuffyUV and MJPEG software compression codecs to compress the video realtime. Unlike software MPEG encoders, neither of the codecs result in much quality loss. In fact HuffyUV is a lossless codec meaning that you will not lose ANY of the quality.

I haven't got time to do the Maths but I suspect the codecs should allow you to capture a full D1 movie to a 40GB partition... just