Advice for video capture card?

[david-e-lewis]

My father is interested in purchasing a video capture card. He wants to transfer his VHS and Hi-8 videos onto CD's for distribution. I'm wondering what people suggest as good video capture cards: Matrox and otherwise?

Cost is not a problem. His computer has 196 MB RAM, but the processor is only 333 MHz, so I imagine that a hardware encoder/decoder is necessary. Ideally, the card should be able to work with Windows 2000.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions and help!

- David Lewis

[dsp]

David Lewis,

Here's a capture card that your father might be interested in http://www.hauppauge.com/html/wintvpvr_datasheet.htm. This capture card does realtime MPEG capture and has Win 2k drivers.

There may be other capture cards out there to look at but I've had good experience with Hauppauge drivers for 2k on my card.

Hope this helps.

(One hundred posts, I'm now a Murcer, yeah)

dsp

[david-e-lewis]

DSP,

Thanks for your suggestion!

Cheers!

- David Lewis

[wkulecz]

I would tell him not to buy a capture card. Get and cheap OHCI 1394 card (ADS Pyro, $50 to $300 depending on software bundle) and a Sony DVMC-DA2 (~$300) , or better yet a Sony D8 camcorder with the analog pass-thru like TRV-120 or TRV-230 (~$600) which will "convert" the Hi8 tapes simply by playing them back in it, then he has a digital camcorder for new projects.

Encoding DV files with TMPGEnc is about as good as you are going to get without spending a lot more money.

The Hauppauge WTV-PVR maybe OK if he's planing to get a DVD burner, but its VCD MPEG1 is poor compared to TMPGEnc. Last I heard it can't do SVCD on the fly. At least one person here has called it crap.

I hope your Dad understands than unless he's targeting CDs for computer playback only, he's in for a world of compatability problems with VCD & SVCD on stand alone DVD players.

With a 333 MHz computer he's near the minimum for W2k, an upgrade may be inorder.

--wally.

[frogster]

I'd suggest a wintv card, but forget the realtime mpeg encoding. i heard the quality was not good. just buy one of the cheaper ones.