I was wondering which card would better serve my needs ?
All I want to do is to put my VHS content on my pc then Transfer it on a DVD without loosing too much quality. I heard the Pvr 250 or 350 would do the job but so is the 150... Can someone direct me into the right direction before I go ahead & buy a Video Editing card.
All external devices have limitations, usually because of the USB 2.0 specs for speed. This can limit your framerate and aspect ratio during capture, no matter how fast your computer is.
I would recommend three things, especially if you have a lot of projects (VHS tapes).
1) A standalone DVD recorder. The quickes method, but you may have troubles with macrovision copy protection on commercial VHS. Advantages: Quick and easy. Disadvantages, no TV tuner, no editing.
2) A hardware mpeg-2 encoder internal PCI card. These produce near-DVD quality mpeg-2 files on your hard drive, ready to author and burn. Quick, and relatively painless. Audio is in sync. You can have some issues with lines on the top or bottom of the captured video, from misaligned heads in the VCR, but this usually ends up in the TV overscan area, so you don't see it anyhow. Advantages: Less time, TV tuner included, easy editing. Disadvantages: Misaligned VCR heads/cheap VCR can produce poor quality video.
3) A TBC such as the Canopus ADVC-110. This will dramatically clean up the source video, but will only capture via firewire to DV-AVI, which you will then have to encode to mpeg-2. Can be very time consuming, but with superb quality, remembering that you cannot improve quality, you can only maintain it. Advantages: Best quality. Disadvantages: Extremely time consuming. Extra software purchases.
If you're serious about quality, and time constraints, then the Hauppauge PVR-250 internal PCI hardware card is a great start. The 150 still has audio sync issues. The 350 gives you FM radio.
If time doesn't matter, but quality is utmost, get the TBC.
