Best MPEG capture card?

[fladavpam]

Hello all,

I have an AverTV Stereo capture card and am satisfied with its capabilities as a $50 capture card. However, I am looking to upgrade to a WinTV-PVR hardware-based MPEG card from Hauppauge, or maybe the All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500. My question is, which card provides the best overall MPEG real-time capture? My software-based AverTV Studio card is adequate for real-time (X)VCD capturing, but I would like to capture (X)SVCD in real time. My system is a P4 2.26 GHZ on a Gigabyte 533MHZ bus board with 256 MB of PC2100 DDRAM. I have a dedicated 30GB capture drive, but unfortunately it's not a SCSI drive (wah ) This will be my 3rd capture card purchased in as many years - I started out with a Pinnacle StudioPCTV card 2 years ago - so I would like to choose the best possible product at reasonable cost to complete my system.

Would you recommend: the WinTV-PVR 350 (model 990)?
the WinTV-PVR 250 (model 980)?
the WinTV-PVR pci (model 880)?
The All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500?

or some other hardware-based MPEG capture card? Please, no recommendations for boards with the Connexant Bt848 chips...I 've been down the path of software encoding and I want to try something different! ....and price is a concern....please, no $4000 cards.....Thanks for all your help, guys.....

fladavpam

[Obiwanbde]

Hi
I bougth , Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-pci model 883(PAL BG) recently. My PC is little bit older(P3-450Mhz,128MbRAM,DiamondViper770-32Mb,Maxtor 15G HD/5400RPM)

I am very satisfied with the cards both MPEG1 and MPEG2 encoding facilities and the software set is great. No need to use any other software rather then proffessional editing purposes. No need to even defrag the drive, no performance problems with Win98SE, DirectX 8.1b.

Regards.

[AHaxton]

I love the AVerTV Stereo quality. If you guys know of something better for around the price range 50-150 buxx tell me. Also I dont want to get rid of my nvidia geforce 4 ti4200. Also my pc is Athlon XP 2200+, 512 mb ram, 120 gig hd and of course my geforce 4.

[Fozzee]

Hi
Have u tried capturing at with a high bitrate and mpeg2 profile then encoding down to XVCD level????
I get great results using PowerVCR2 and the AverTv Studio.

I create a profile......
Mpeg2
7500 Bitrate
720x576 Resolution.

I capture at this level . Then I encode using TMPGEnc down to VCD or SVCD levels . With very nice results. As good as any samples i've seen on here.

Fozzee

[fladavpam]

I have used the AverTV to capture at high resolutions and then re-encode, but I was looking for a solution where I wouldn't have to re-encode. I did purchase the hauppauge wintv-pvr 250, and it works like a dream.

I am in the process of selling my avertv card, if someone wants it.... :P

The biggest problem I have had so far with the MPEG-2 files captured from either the WinTV-PVR 250 or the AverTV Stereo card is the fact that I can't seem to get TMPGenc to open the audio stream on an MPEG-2 although it will open the audio stream of an MPEG-1 file...any ideas?

THANKS for all your help!

[fladavpam]

By the way, Circuit City in our area has the WinTV-PVR 250 for $99.99 after rebate this week - what a steal!