Need help choosing a good video capture card.

[pr-man 1]

ok I have a Sony Handycam CCD-TRV57 video camera with a lot of video of my two daughters growing up. I want to start backing them up to VCD or dvd-r. I have the burning hardware and software but not the capture hardware. I have a $200 credit at best buy and would like to see if anyone can suggest a good capture card. www.bestbuy.com. It seems all the Dazzle products got horrible reviews so I guess those are out.

 

PS I use Winxp Pro

Thx

[Jerry Atrik 0]

i would suggest the pinnacle studio series

studio av/dv will capture digital and analog and includes the studio software for about 130-150 (i have this one)

it outputs vcd, svcd and dv formats, and will do the burning. (it will also output most any format that u have a codec installed for)

 

it has an mpeg processor on the card to speed the coding along.

 

ps beware of the usb capture ones.

[pr-man 1]

Jerry do you see that one on the best buy website? I cant seem to find it.

 

nevermind they dont I just called them, figures. get stuck with a $200 gift card with them and they dont have what I want. to bad you cant cash the gift card in

[Jerry Atrik 0]

Pinnacle Systems Studio Deluxe Version 8 Video Editing Kit

Model: 210100189

on bestbuy.com

 

 

it's the same as the one i have but it's got connectors for the front

and it's gobs more

 

 

i got my studio av/dv for 102$ shipped at

http://www.needsoftware.com/777535.html

[duhmez 0]

Any ATI Vivo or all in wonder (radeon or better) will make fantastic captures. AIW I bought comes with studio 8, whichpeople seem to like, Ive not tried it yet. I use down and dirty tools like avisynth etc for my encoding.

[lorddraxar 0]

You can go for an advanced PVR card with built in MPEG chips. The problem with most of these card are the use of proprietary software. Since the card itself cost a lot, the softwares are buggy and in almost every case, you are stuck with it.

 

I personnaly got a ADS Instant DVD... these make very good looking movies in realtime but you got only two or three capture programs... And drivers aren't that good. But I manage to always get it working...

 

These might actually be too much trouble for you. In fact since you only want to make very good transfert of your home movies, get any TV card which support high resolution and use a program that makes MPEG afterward like TMPEGEnc. Realtime encoding can never be better than slow two pass software encoding. Realtime encoding cards are better with VERY casual use... like me I use it as a VCR and fill books of CD each year.

 

The Ati TV Wonder looks an attractive choice but better stay away from it... I got one and the drivers aren't especially spectacular, and it only does 240 line vertical maximum. It can be unlocked with an open source drivers but it adds a lot of garbage. Not very good.

 

The Canopus ADVC-100 is a wonderful card that would give you standard DV feed but it's over your budget (250$)...

Next are ASUS TV Tuner cards... only 50$ if you look well.. These got good reviews and are cheap... You can even make realime capture if you choose a good software (but these does not include MPEG chip inside) but they do full DVD resolution (752 * 480)

 

Oh my! I'm writing a new Lord of the Rings there... Time to shut up! Hehe

Hope it give some you some clues