What to do about a new video capture card....

[Rukes]

For a while, my G400 Max and RRG combo has been a godsend for my job, a videogame journalist. I get great performance with PC games, and I can capture great MPEG's with the Rainbow Runner G.

According to the new interview, it seems Matrox probably wont have a major "hardcore gamers" card for a while, dashing my hopes of keeping this setup...

Since I will EVENTUALLY (not in the near future, this G400 is gonna be used until it dries up get like a GeForce 3 or 4 or 5 or 6, etc...

What are the best reccomendations for a stand-alone PCI video capturing card that offeres visual quality up to par with the Matrox Rainbow Runner G, that I can pair up with a GeForce.

[Dr Mordrid]

At the prosumer level, the Matrox RT-2500 can capture both analog and digital to either DV or MPEG-2 ($899);

http://www.videoguys.com/rt2500.html

Lower down the food chain at the mid priced level is the FAST DV.now.AV, which can capture and export DV from either analog or digital sources ($499);

http://www.videoguys.com/DVnowAV.html

and Pinnacles DC30+ ($499);

http://www.videoguys.com/dc30pro.html

and at the low end of the food chain is the Pinnacle DC10+ ($99);

http://www.videoguys.com/studio.htm

and the WinTV Theater mod. 495 ($121);

http://www.us.buy.com/retail/product...rmat=7#product

The WinTV can be combined with AVI_IO as the capture proggie and PICVideo MJPeg as the software compressor.

Of these only the WinTV has a TV tuner, but the VCR can provide that as well.

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 21 April 2001).]

[KuroNeko]

Doc, that reminds me, you always said the RT2000 doesn't need HuffYUV capture, the MPEG2 capture was good enough for lossless compression not to be needed.

I am still curious though : CAN the RT2000/2500 work with HuffYUV?

Sorry to be so insistent, curious minds need to know

Neko

[cjyo~]

Huffy didn't work with my RT2000, but I only tried it for the heck of it. The max bitrate MPEG2 I-frame gives the best looking results for analog footage. I don't think you can "hack" it because the C-Cube chip is a specialized hardware DV and MPEG2 (only) encoder chip.

Someone has even mentioned bringing the RT2000 capture system to capture directly to the MPEG2 codec from the camera while filming (bypassing the lower quality camera DV codec) for Chroma Key work...

[AndrewDV]

Hi,

Just to add another WinTV option, there is the WinTV-Radio. It is about $30-$50 cheaper (depending on where you shop) than the WinTV-Theater and is based on the exact same bt878A Fusion chipset. It also has S-Video inputs as well as the other stereo/FM tuner gadgets (toy stuff, but still fun). The only difference, the Theater model has the ability to decode surround sound.

A serious recommendation, to you and any potential WinTV buyers looking for video capture, is to get a RAID0 setup. Otherwise, your quality is drastically limited.

As the Doc said, you can do a lot with this card. Just make sure you have a good CPU and a RAID0 setup. Just for a benchmark, I can capture 720x480 on my 1.1Ghz AMD with 2-IBM 75gxp drives (45GB each).

Hope this helps.