Recommendation for video capture

[Tim]

I own a Radeon 9700 Pro myself and am not considering video capture at
present, but am helping a buddy build his own PC and he does. Basically he
wants to take old video tapes and convert them to DVD and possibly capture
on-going shows off his Tivo for conversion to DVD in the same manner.

Can anyone point me towards a newsgroup or web forum where the merits of
various video capture solutions are discussed or reviewed? Of course, if
anyone here has experience and an opinion please bring it on.

Thanks,
Tim

 

[J.Clarke]

I own a Radeon 9700 Pro myself and am not considering video capture at
present, but am helping a buddy build his own PC and he does.
Basically he wants to take old video tapes and convert them to DVD and
possibly capture on-going shows off his Tivo for conversion to DVD in
the same manner.

Can anyone point me towards a newsgroup or web forum where the merits
of various video capture solutions are discussed or reviewed? Of
course, if anyone here has experience and an opinion please bring it
on.

<http://www.avsforum.com>
<http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/>
<http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/>

Before you do anything else read up on Tivo hacking. There are better
ways to get recordings off a Tivo than by playing them back and using
analog capture.

For analog capture, the ATI All-In-Wonder boards work well, as do the
Matrox boards. The Hauppauge PVR series have hardware MPEG encoding,
which takes a load off of your system, however the chip they use does
not provide for uncompressed capture--if he's planning on doing MPEG
caputures exclusively then one of those would be a good choice. Any of
the boards that use the Brooktree/Conexant BT8xx series chips would also
be a good option, as those chips have a tremendous amount of third-party
support--with one of those boards you're not stuck with the board
manufacturer's software.

One nice compromise is the Dvico FusionHDTV II board--it uses a BT848
chip (IIRC--it's a BT800 series anyway) so all kinds of third party
software will work with it for analog capture, but it has a digital
tuner and also functions as a high definition TV receiver using the
software provided by the manufacturer of the board (the software is not
perfect but they are releasing updates regularly). And if you have an
ATI Radeon board the Dvico will make good use of it, considerably
reducing the workload on the CPU.

 

[Ms.Goodwrench]

I own a Radeon 9700 Pro myself and am not considering video capture at
present, but am helping a buddy build his own PC and he does.
Basically he wants to take old video tapes and convert them to DVD and
possibly capture on-going shows off his Tivo for conversion to DVD in
the same manner.

Can anyone point me towards a newsgroup or web forum where the merits
of various video capture solutions are discussed or reviewed? Of
course, if anyone here has experience and an opinion please bring it
on.

Thanks,
Tim

Tim, I've been capturing using ADS's USB Instant DVD for about 6 months.
My old system was a P4 1.4 ghz, Radeon 9700, 500 mb RAM. I couldn't
capture (vcr tapes to pc for burning onto DVD) for more than 5-6 minutes at
a time without the machine lagging behind, the video getting choppy then
freezing up... I invested in a Dell Dimension XPS a few months ago, and it
captures fantastic video, whether from USB I-DVD or digital video from my
camcorder. The system specs are P4 2.8 FSB, Radeon 9800 Pro, and a gig of
memory. I can capture and entire 2 hours VHS tape with nary a stutter.

So there's what worked so-so, and what works great, at least in my own
experience.

 

[randoo]

rec.video.desktop