your favorite capture card

[Brian]

I have a ATI TV Wonder VE card. I purchased it last year to try and convert my VHS tapes to VCD. I ended up giving up on it. After purchasing the card and getting into the process (and reading on this website) I realized that this card can't capture at a resolution that is viewable and I had problems with the sound.

My question is, what is the best card for this. After reading on this site, I see that most cards have some problems. I just want to archive all of my VHS tapes without a loss of quality.

My system is a
1 Gig Duron
MB Asus A7V266
512 Meg DDR Ram
ATI TV Wonder VE card
SB Live!

I was using the Huffy codec, TMPG and Virtual Dub.

I would appreciate any suggestions.

[ItsMe]

I have had three cards over the years.

The Pinnacle PCTV Pro, good card altough some people have issues. Can capture straght to MPEG 720x576 (PAL) and 480x576 (NTSC), (S)VCD using the latest software. You need a fast CPU for higher resolutions though. Some macrovision type problems with some video tapes.

Hauppage PVR 250, crappy software and audio sync issues forced me to take this one straght back to the shop.

Vidac VMagic TV Plus, the one I am using now. Captures straight to (S)VCD & (half) D1 DVD using hardware encoder. Works on "slower" CPU's. Great card albiet expensive.

[Brian]

It's me,

I have a 1 gig Duron, do I need a faster processor? The Vmagic card you metioned does it come with all the software that I would need to convert VHS to VCD or SVCD?

Thanks for the response.

Brian

[videojoe]

Buy a analog to digital converter such as the Canopus AVDC-50, or buy a digital camcorder with analog passthrough. I did the latter and could not be happier. Perfect captures every time with no audio sync issues. Yes it is more expensive than a tv card, but it is worth it.

[jarvis1781]

hey Brian,

that is strange you are having problems with your ATI VE

I also have that card for just the purpose you mentioned.

I backed up all the old family videos from VHS and they came out great

watching them on the television I couldn't tell the difference between the VHS and the newly created VCD

[Brian]

Jarvis,
What programs were you using? I listed my computer system, do you think I may have some inferior hardware that might be causing my problems? What codec did you use?
Brian

[crahak]

Ok, dunno for sure about that ATI card you have, but anyways, I have tried 4.

Rage Fury Pro: really fuzzy, captures at 640x480. Not quite impressed.

AIW 7500: expected somewhat better results. Fuzzy again. Rather deceiving.

el-cheapo bt8x8 card type of deal (30$ tv tuner): with the proper drivers, this gives amazing results, and it's quite cheap too.

geforce4 ti4200 vivo: with the v1.08 capture drivers and s-video in, works pretty good. Better than every ATI card I've owned so far.

Dealing with old VHS tapes can be challenging at times too. Some people have to resort to a TBC or other way of transferring it... Good luck

[fmctm1sw]

I have a ATI TV Wonder VE card. I purchased it last year to try and convert my VHS tapes to VCD. I ended up giving up on it.

You may want to try another driver before you give up on it. I could only cap at 320x240 with hauppauges oem driver. I switched to the one at btwincap.sourceforge.net and cap regularly at 640x480.....

[ItsMe]

It's me,

I have a 1 gig Duron, do I need a faster processor? The Vmagic card you metioned does it come with all the software that I would need to convert VHS to VCD or SVCD?

Thanks for the response.

Brian

To use the VMagic you don't need a faster CPU. With most other cards a faster CPU would be better but not essential per se. For instance you could proably capture to AVI using something like the the Pinnacle TV card and virtualdub and then use tmpgenc to convert to VCD or SVCD.

The VMagic will capture to DVD, VCD & SVCD compatible MPEG files, it does this using its mpeg encoder hardware. The software that comes with the card enables you to set the various parameters for the hardware, cut and paste clips etc. There are profiles for VCD & SVCD and you can make your own profiles. You will need other software to actually burn the disks, Aheads Nero for instance. With the VMagic you often get better result if you capture using one of the DVD presets, and then trancoding to VCD or SVCD. Transcoding to VCD is blindingly fast with the VMagic, compared to software encoders that is. You can get up to 100fps (I get up to 85fps on a 2Ghz. P4). On a 1Ghz Athlon when going from 720x576 to 352x288 it takes about 25 minutes according to Vidac (and I believe them). The VMagic has no audio sync problems, even after transcoding a couple of times.

If you buy an analog to digital converter as videojoe suggests, then once you have your film on harddisk, you will still need to convert it to mpeg. This will take a long time on a 1Ghz. CPU. Also digital video takes up about 14GB of disk space for each hour. This is a good solution though as you get DV files which are terrific for editing.

[jarvis1781]

I use a program called IUVCR

I capture with a high divx 5 pro bitrate then convert to VCD with CCE

works great for me

you should get that program

also includes a scheduler so you can record your favorite shows into divx

[Brian]

Thanks for the reply's I will try this out and let all of you know how it went tomorrow.
Brian

[jkresh]

anyone know how to get a vmagic card in the US (without ordering from their stie and converting to Euros)?

[ItsMe]

I don't think you can order it outside of Germany or Switzerland. Besides being able to order it directly from Vidac, they also also have a list of authorized dealers, all of which are either in Germany or Switzerland.

[Spicuzza]

Brian,

Here are some simple system tweaks that may help:

The following are useful, video-specific tweaks for improving the performance of your system. Some of the paths may vary slightly between various versions of Windows.

If you have two hard drives on your system, install the software on your system drive, usually C:, and capture video to your other drive.

Your display card shouldn't use too much of your resources just to provide you with overlay. Right-click on your desktop, select Properties>Settings. Lower your color depth to "High Color (16-bit)", and set your screen resolution to 1024x768. You might want to disable some of the high-end 3D gaming features, which have no bearing on video display.

Make sure DMA is enabled: Select Control Panel, System>Device Manager. Select IDE Controller>Primary/ Secondary>Advanced, and make sure DMA is selected on each of your drives.

Disable "Write-Behind Caching" on the hard drive used for video capture. Go Control Panel>System, right click on your hard drive, select Properties, and make sure Write Caching is DISabled.

Change the values of your Paging File (Swap File) size in Control Panel>System> Advanced>Virtual Memory. Set the minimum and maximum values to twice your amount of RAM. So if you have 256Mb of RAM, set both your minimum and maximum paging file limits to 512.

Also, SHUT DOWN every program running in the background and defrag your hard drive before you capture.

[Brian]

Ok I tried to get my card working last night. I was able to watch my VHS tapes on the computer but when I tried to capture using Virtual Dub I got an error 418 (I think) and it said it couldn't find the driver. I did a guick search on Google and found a lot of hits on this error. I didn't have a chance to investigate last night, it was getting too late, so I will read on it today.

I don't understand why this is such a pain it seems like a pretty easy process on paper.

Thanks again for all of your input, I will try the system tweaks tonight too.
Brian

[Brian]

I tried to fix the virtual dub error and did not have any luck. From what I read it sounds like if I install 2000 I may have better luck. I currently have 98se. Any thoughts?
Brian

[Nelson37]

The res limit in the TV Wonder is a very common problem, it seems the solution is to use different drivers - check out Rage3d.com. Many have solved this issue.

Also, adjust your video display settings, I find increasing the color saturation slightly gives significant improvement for TV display -I have AIW 128.