Has anyone tried the REALmagic Digital Video Recorder?

[jeffbenson]

I've tried the Dazzle DVC and DVCII and didn't have the greatest opinions about them. I am trying to go from VHS to VCD. I've got a Thunderbird 950 with a 30GB UATA-100 drive and 650MB 133MHZ SDRAM. I came across an ad for the REALmagic Digital Video Recorder and hadn't heard anything about it yet. Has anyone had any experience with this?

http://www.sigmadesigns.com/products/dvr.htm
or
http://www.teamsolutions.co.uk/sigma/images/dvr2.jpg
seems the part

[Darkbird]

I've had a DVR board for well over a year. The original drivers sucked big time, almost unusable. But, the latest drivers are quite good, and they support Win98/ME as well as Win2000 (originally only WinNT was supported). The original drivers had one advantage: they didn't care about MacroVision. The new drivers will stop recording if MacroVision is detected.

The real-time preview is very nice to see how things are being encoded.

It gives very very good results for VHS to VCD mpeg1.

The results for mpeg2 at full DVD resolution leave a bit to be desired unless you give it enough bitrate (at least 3.5Mbps). This is especially true fo noisy VHS sources. However, capturing from a clean source such as DVD, you can go down to 2.3Mbps with acceptable results for full-res mpeg2.

The biggest problem that I have with the board is loss of audio sync. For a long movie, I have to make the recording in parts about 1GB or 45 mins or so. Then edit/merge the captured parts into a whole movie. The audio sync problem may be because I have an early model board, or it may be the motherboard's PCI clock rate. It locked up when I was overclocking my system, so I had to set it for normal PCI bus speeds (33MHz). Wish I knew what the problem was.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Darkbird on 2001-08-15 06:58:23 ]</font>

[jeffbenson]

How much do the boards go for?

[SHS]

Try $700 US.
You may as well get Dazzle DVC2 No Tuner ?MacroVision? or WinTV-PVR WithTuner With NoMacroVision carp both are under $300 buck US.

[jeffbenson]

You're kidding!!! That's a lot for a card without those features. That's a little pricey for what I want to use it for.

[SHS]

No I'am not kidding it real that High but it was just one a few MPEG capture card that where out a 1 1/2yrs ago where all other cost big FAT Bucks.

[jeffbenson]

There are so many other cards out right now that do the same thing (and more) for less money. I'm wondering what's driving the price. Maybe it's got an advanced processing method that rivals the other cards.

[gf]

There is one thing to remember about this card. Other cards do there compression with the on board cpu and using LIGOS software. And there is a possibility of dropped frames at high video resolution. With this board it is done on board and to my knowledge (small) it doesn't.

[Darkbird]

When the RealMAGIC DVR first came out, it was the only thing on the market that could do true hardware encoding and decoding at anywhere near a reasonable price. Other stuff was going for multi-thousand dollars.

[gf]

I own a Sigma card and when I capture in MPEG2 either in elementary mode or MPEG2 mode I cannot get the file into TMPGEnc. It comes back with an error "cannot acess file or file not supported". Is there anyone that got this one to work?
Thanks alot!!

[SHS]

gf buy Womble Multimedia Mpeg2vcr it best MPEG2 editor there is and only that can read RealMAGIC DVR made MPEG1,2 files and think Ulead MediaStudio Pro 6.0 with patch dose to other then I know any other MPEG editor that can.
Try out Mediaware M2-edit Pro 4.0

[gf]

I was wondering if Womble Multimedia Mpeg2vcr would make it possible to bring my video into TMPGEnc. My purpose is to convert it to MPEG1 since the video card does not do a good job on MPEG1 video capture.