Integrated Capture and Video Card or Two Separate Cards ?

[weasyl]

Hi Gang,

I have been digging through the capture card reviews etc. and now
need advice. I want to know whether or not I should buy an
integrated graphics/capture card such as the ATI Raedon VIVO or an ATI 8500 All in Wonder or whether I should grab for example the ATI Raedon 9000 or 9000pro for pure graphics and supplement it with a capture card (I am leaning towards the Leadtek TV2000XP)? The end price would be fairly similar and I need a graphics card upgrade anyway.

Which would give me the best combination of gaming performance and video capture quality in your opinion ?

NOTE: All I would really be using the capture for is converting VHS tapes
to SVCD. And maybe some hobby video editing.

Thanks a million for any help !

Weasyl

[sterno]

Personally, I would choose seperate cards. In general, the combo cards give you acceptable gaming performance and acceptable capture quality, but standalone cards do both better. It's the same kind of thing as an all-in-one bookshelf stereo vs. a component system, components usually give you better quality but the single system takes up less space and can be more convenient.

The trade you make is in needing two slots, which isn't a problem if you have a good PC but can be a problem if you got suckered in by a cheap one that has only 1-2 slots.

[Bizuser]

I don't care about gaming at all, just capture. I assumed the benefit of integrated card was that the video data did not have to travel across the PCI bus ... but that could be totally bogus. If I buy a separate capture card, does the input datastream come straight from the capture card to the CPU/memory - in other words, does it bypass the video card altogether? I'm using AIW 128 combo right now, but could easily be convinced to switch. What's the best card for capture only? I was looking at the Pinnacle model, deluxe, combo for Digital and Analog capturing.

Thanks for any advice.

[medievil]

depends on your needs. I have a stand alone Wintv PCI card that far, far outperforms both in capability and Quality, my Combo Asus V8200 TI200.

The combination of the WinTV card and WinDVD Recorder produces Top notch DVD quality MPEG 2/AC3 ready files. All thats needed is authoring and burning to disk. The Capture side of the Asus card has a severe Brightness problem as well as a white line that stays at the top. There is other software that you can use to improve this, but it's to much of a hassle.
I've no experience with the ATI AIW cards, but I hear nothing but good things about them.



*Edit for spelling*

[donpedro]

I was looking at the Pinnacle model, deluxe, combo for Digital and Analog capturing.

Just to clarify. There are two products with "deluxe" in name made by Pinnacle.

Pinnacle Studio Deluxe (I don't know too much about it) - It is PCI capture card that will let you capture analog or digital source bundled witn Pinnacle Studio 8 (I believe).

Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe (I own one) - This is USB (2.0) external mpeg2 encoder with TV tuner, S-Video and composite inputs (sound encoded inside)

[Bizuser]

Thanks for the clarification - I did mean the studio deluxe.

But since you bring up the other device - PCTV Deluxe - how does USB 2.0 perform for video? I just bought a USB 2.0 external HD, and got 'actual' (timed, copying about 10 gig in windows explorer) data rates of about 20 Megabytes/second. This does seem pretty good (but not close to 'spec', which is 60 MBytes/sec).

I presume you pretty much 'must' use MPEG with this type of card, because you can't rely on the audio and video being passed through the USB in anything close to synch - so let the box do the encoding, delivering a 'final product' (MPEG Stream) to the PC. So then the question is, how good is it's MPEG2 stream? Can it be burned straight to SVCD using (eg) VCDEasy? Or does it need demux/remux, etc? Can the MPEG2 stream be cut using TMPG without problems? I've tried using ATI's direct to MPEG2 and it's not good - the stream is clearly non-compliant. Cutting in TMPG results in really badly de-synched files, etc. Burning in VCDEasy generates lots of errors. I tried demux/remux, helped a bit, but still not good enough - so I gave up on direct to MPEG2 (get good results with MJPEG, VDub, etc). But the idea of an external USB2 device is very appealing ...

[sterno]

I assumed the benefit of integrated card was that the video data did not have to travel across the PCI bus ... but that could be totally bogus. If I buy a separate capture card, does the input datastream come straight from the capture card to the CPU/memory - in other words, does it bypass the video card altogether?

If you're only watching TV on it, that's true, it's usually all done within the card. If you use (for instance) a WinTV card or other bt8x8-based card, watching TV requires going over the PCI bus, but usually doesn't require CPU/RAM access because the TV card will send the image straight to the video card (as long as the video card supports it, which virtually all modern cards do). I don't know how ATI cards handle the audio, but for WinTV cards they just use a pass-through to your sound card's line-in jack, so nothing is sent over the bus for that. This is why ATI All-in-Wonder cards and WinTV cards have very low system requirements for watching TV, they don't involve the rest of the machine.

I emphasized "watching" above because things change when you do capture. The audio and video get processed in to an AVI stream and written to disk, so there's really no way to avoid going through CPU/RAM/etc. unless you have specialized hardware of some sort.

[donpedro]

Bizuser,

It is USB 2.0 hardware, but I use it with USB 1.1 ports on laptop or home PC. So far I captured couple of movies at 6000kB/s VBR. Captured mpeg2 have no sync issue. Only when de-muxed or authored on DVD in will become out-of-sync for about 0.5s on the end. I am still looking into this so I don't know why is it happening. I think that quality of video is realy great and yes, I can burn it to DVD with no problems and also cut with TMPGEnc (other then 0.5s issue). Maybe I will upgarde to USB 2.0 port soon to see if it will help.