Capture Card recommendations

[marcus]

I have a VIVO (video in/video out) capture card which I want to use to capture direct from my Sky Digi box, via SVideo. However Im not too impressed by the results, it captures ok at 320 x 288 25fps, but any higher and I get additional black scanlines appear whilst the resolution it works at is considerably lower than I was after. My feeling is the card itself isnt particularly good for high quality capturing and I wanted recommendations of dedicated capture cards for this purpose.

Whilst Ill consider most price ranges, a Matrox card suggested to me retailing at over $800 is somewhat out of my league...

Also, anyone know the native resolution of my Sky Digi output, I view it in Widescreen?

[Super Stu]

yes, PAL.

Last time I tried capturing full fps, full res PAL with my Hauppauge WinTV it dropped quite a large number of frames (unless you're using an ATI card which has onboard realtime compression, capture to raw avi or similar, else you're wasting cpu cycles). I suspect it was a combination of kack processor and disk (p3 500 etc). Your mileage may vary a bit better these days.

I'd be tempted to investigate an all-in-wonder ATI card of some description, for the realtime encoding I mentioned earlier. Toms etc will have umpteen reviews.

[replicant]

The 9800p AIW is available now. Its a worthwhile purchase for you due to the capture quality that stu has mentioned, plus it has the same raw power as the 9800 pro.

If i was you Id sell the 5600u, and invest in one of those. The difference a fast graphics card will make to your P4 system, especially if you want to play HL2, will justify the expense.

[Super Stu]

Indeed, check the review of the AIW 9800, it's a beast. Toms has one, or perhaps Hexus. Forget which.

[mid]

If you don't want to blow ?300 on upgrading your graphics card just to get the capture facilities, you might want to look at the Hauppauge PVR series. Don't touch the original one, as the encoder isn't as good, but there is the PVR 250 at ~?100, that does hardware MPEG2 compression on the fly for full DVD resolution capturing, or the PVR 350 for about ?25 more, that also adds hardware decompression and a halfway decent TV out, should your current graphics card not have one. Its not a Matrox, but then you're not paying for one.

[Roost]

Isn't there a packard bell one that everyone always recommends?

[mid]

The Packard Bell is indeed recommended (though I've not seen it actually in a PC World shop, only on their website, so I've not tried it), but that has no hardware encoding facilities, and so I strongly suspect Marcus won't see anything different from what his current card is doing.

[Super Stu]

Ah, Hauppauge have added an mpeg2 encoder to their line up? Nice.

I like Hauppague gear, except for their cheesy software. Beauty is, this matters not, as it works as a generic capture device.

[mid]

Indeed it does - my mate has it just linked to TMPGenc and Virtual Dub instead.

Actually, it occurs to me that Marcus's problem may be software, not hardware, after all. I'd recommend giving different software a go and see what you think - apparently Nero 6 (which has a free 30 day trial on the website, and is only ?40 for the full boxed deluxe version from Amazon) does capture straight onto DVD as long as you've got a 1.6GHz or faster, though I've not tried it.

[marcus]

Ive given up on TMPGEnc, whenever I capture its in black and white, and corrupt (I can go into more detail later) and amending the priorities makes no difference.

Thinking more about this, say I was to buy a standalone DVD recorder, surely I would be able to rip straight to a DVD-R, and the rip the VOB files onto my PC and edit/covert to AVI - would the quality of this be superior to the above methods? Seemingly this is what Mid means (more or less) - I have a DVD Writer on my PC.

[eghamninja]

I have one of these which I use in a XP Media Centre PC I built. The card supports realtime MPEG1 and MPEG2 encoding, without making more than about a 5% CPU hit.

[mid]

I've not tried standalone recorders yet, but I doubt there is a huge difference in quality from that of the Hauppauge card. Part of the problem, though, is that DVD-Rs aren't cheap, and so ripping to hard-drive is going to be better in the long run for you. Also, you've only got 4 preset recording qualities on a standalone box, while with the right drivers a 250/350 can be persuaded to supply mpeg2 at any bitrate.

Of course, the balance to this is that a standalone recorder is the only way to capture RGB that I can find.

[marcus]

Do you know anything about the ATI All In Wonder card? Id expect Ill buy either of these two and wondered if youve experienced the ATI.

[Super Stu]

Hexus

They'll have umpteen links to reviews of the AIW.

[mid]

I've not tried it myself - don't have the budget for a 9800 one, and an affordable AIW would be rather limiting in 3D performance.

Actually, does anyone have any experience with the NVidia equivalent? an FX5200 is rather underwhelming too, but the ~?100 for one is rather more reasonable.