Capture hardware

Dnd4evr · Sep 20, 2003

I am thinking of converting VHS to VCD or DVD. I plan on building a PC for this (and other stuff). What kind of capture hardware do you recommend? I have been thinking of getting an ATI 9800 Pro All-In-Wonder card, but if a separate capture card would be better I would love to hear about it.

woody · Sep 20, 2003

I have an early version Radeon AIW.It works fine for me.Guess it depends what you want to capture,and which format.Lots of opinions on what card to buy.Anyways take a look at this link. http://www.dvdrhelp.com/capture#45

ChickenMan · Sep 20, 2003

II use a Geforce Ti 4200 card with VIVO and get great DVDRs captured from VHS. I'm using Video Studio 7 at the moment for the capturing.

bionic · Sep 20, 2003

I also have and old radeon32 aiw, real nice card with good quality all around.
The aiw 9800\pro card is a very nice card, but its kinda expensive (if you dont need the 3d support). Also it is somewhat limited in the support of different capture soft and capture resolutions because of the wdm driver format(fex if you want to use virtualdub for capture). The best would be something with native vfw support.
A more economic (and versatile) solution might be a tv card with video in fex MSI TV @nywhere Master. (unfortunately this is also a wdm based card)

http://www.tv-cards.com/ is a nice place to gather some info on the subject.

ipdave · Sep 22, 2003

Depends on the quality you want, the ease of use, and of course, the Price.

The newer AIW cards do nicely at DVD realtime MPEG2 capture. I bought a Dazzle DVC-II PCI card that comes with flaky software, but I use freeware software that works well with it. Can capture SVCDs at custom rates, and DVD MPEGs with no frame drops. You can pick one up for about $90 if you look around. ( I paid about $200 a couple years ago). I don't think that any of the USB ones are all that great, but the Pinnacle package seems good.

Dnd4evr · Sep 25, 2003

I was considering the 9800 pro because some days I'm a game junkie. I am realy looking forward to playing DOOM 3 when it comes out and from what I have been hearing you are going to need a realy good video card. So I figured why not get the AIW version and solve 2 needs with 1 card. I'm not building just yet though and saving money is a good thing and so is avoiding grief so I figured I'd ask around. I am completely open to other ideas

Thanks for the reminder of the DVDRHELP site. I've been there before, but forgot they have sections dedicated to things like ... Capture cards.

It realy pays to investigate before buying most things. Finding out the hard way realy sucks! Thank God for the internet.

plextorman · Oct 22, 2003

ChickenMan said:
II use a Geforce Ti 4200 card with VIVO and get great DVDRs captured from VHS. I'm using Video Studio 7 at the moment for the capturing.

AHha!-I also use a GF4 Ti 4200 (Leadtek)with VIVO.I use Ulead Video Studio 6 SE DVD-What`s the difference between VS 7 and VS6? What are the improvements?

ChickenMan · Oct 24, 2003

Arr.. 1

Not a lot, if VS6 is working for you stay with it. The capture side is almost identical as far as I can see. Dont use the other features so not sure.

plextorman · Oct 25, 2003

Well,I`ve got 2 on at the moment (3 if you count Winfast PVR-you can capture with that but you can`t edit stuff like you can with the other two)
VS6 and NeroVision Express 2.Just trying `em out,seeing which one I like.
Unless you also count Micro$**te`s MovieMaker...nah..