Capturing card question

[Tick]

hi everyone, i know this has probably been posted 1000 times before but i couldnt find a search feature on this forum to read anyof those posts.. anyway here goes..

currently im running an amd 1.5 ghz, with 512mb ddr and 149gig hdd, geforce 2 mx, and a now defunct tview capture card (brooktree fusion?).. what im looking for is a capture card that will allow me to capture from my cable, vcr, and camcorder at decent quality with decent sound (biggest problem ive had so far)
what kinda of capture card shoudl i be looking at, my price range is anything up to $200 (US)
any in put on what kind of card i should buy wold be greatly appreciated
Thanks
Tick

[TasDavo2]

if you look to your left and under the "other" heading is a link called Capture Cards.
You will be amazed at what you can discover in there.

[Anonymous65]

You basically have only two options if you want a TV tuner, a capture card without any hardware compression, and a card with hardware compression.

For cards without compression, you have WinTV and other generic TV tuner cards with the BT8x8 chip. These cards costs around $50 to $100, with options like S-video input, stereo TV tuner, FM radio and so on. You need a fast PC with lots of hard drive space, which you do. You can capture almost any format and pick your method of software compression later on.

The second option is a capture card with a hardware encoder, like the WinTV PVR. It does the compression, so you don't need a fast PC with lots of hard drive space. The drawback is that the quality sometimes is not as good as software compressed video, and it's hard to edit already compressed video, like mpeg video. The cards with onboard hardware encoders usually costs from $150 to $250.

You have to decvice what you want to do with your video, how much video you're going to capture, and how you want to save or store the video. If you need to edit and add effects and titles, then go with a cheap AVI capture card, for making a DVD or VCD from a video tape, then go with a hardware encoder, unless you have lots of time on your hands encoding.

[Barnabas]

If you want to make VCD's, try the Provideo PV-233 hardware card. It only does MPEG1, but makes great looking captures in real-time. The PV-233 will cost you about $100 - $115.

[Tommyknocker]

Tasdavo@:
If I look left at the Capture Card option, I would discover that is still under maintenance. What have you discovered?