Threw $100 away on this Pinnacle AV USB capture device and it blows ducks. Guess I need a PCI card so what's the latest and greatest and what's the next best thing to that?
Well Most PCI Cards will Be the Regular Analogue Capture card that natively uses Software compression, so you will need a Mpeg capture Program if you want to capture to Mpeg and Most programs will capture to AVI...Some of the best new Analogue PCI cards are the New 10 bit Capture/TV Cards like the new "MSI TV @nywere" or the new Asus TV Tuners, The Produce about a 40% Crisper and cleaner images than the last generation of 8 bit capture cards like the Old BT8*8 Cards, These new Cards Run anywere from $65-$125 US and they rely on you haveing a Fast PC and a Fast dedicated Hard drive for Capture...The Newer "ATI All In Wonder Raedeon" Cards that use the New Theater 200 Capture chip Produce very high Quality captures also ,I use an ATI card that has one of the Older Rage theater chips and it captures Nice Quality captures so these New cards Must be even better, But the Problem with them is that they are allways Built on to an AGP Video card so to get one you have to take out your AGP card but there Video cards are some of the Better ones...The Device I would recomend over everything is called the "Canopus ADVC-100" it is a Box that Converts analogue Signals to Digital and compresses them useing a High Quality Hardware DV Encoder and transfers the Video to your PC VIA Firewire Port, The Quality is awesome and the Audio and Video streams are Locked at the Time of Compression so there is no chance of audio and Video Sync Problems...The Video is Transfered to your PC in DV AVI format which is extremely easy to edit and can be edited repeatedly without looseing any Video Quality and the Files can be easilly converted to High Quality Mpeg2 Files for DVD authoring useing a Software mpeg encoder...These Units are Quite expensive at about $250 US but are virtually unsurpassed in Analogue to Digital Quality...There is another Model that is an Internal PCI Card that does the same thing, It is called the "Canopus-ADVC-50" which sells for about $150 US, I believe it uses the same Compression engine but doesn"t have as Many Features and Inputs but Produces simular Quality...The Canopus ADVC-100 is the Next Capture device I will get, I have owned 8 different capture devices some good and some just terrorable, well anyways Good Luck....Cheers
I own a Dazzle DVC II and it is GREAT. I am having a problem with it now. But I think it was my negligence. If you want to record in MPEG1 or MPEG2 or VCD or SVCD then this card it great. But if you want to go for some other formats like DivX then it has got ZERO support as no other software works except the one supplied. It also has got Macrovision OFF so you can record from DVDs. And I am not talking about Piracy!!!!!! For PROs. You can mix many clips with transition effects and all the fancy stuff.
Totally agree - USB capture devices are not great. I know it is not a PCI card but I use an external firewire box called Directors Cut 2 made by a British company called Miglia and the results are superb
Hello guys, Just for your info that Leadtek has 1 card that is 10 bit decoder and that is the WinFast TV2000 XP Expert. I bought it yesterday and the performance is really superb but the only inconvenience is the downloading of latest driver and PVC software inorder to work perfectly because I heard that the supplied CD software has quite afew problems. Anyway, I did not use the CD at all so I'm not too sure.
