Capture Card Recommendation

[Raiden]

This software looks really great, and is exactly what I was looking for. However, I don't have a tuner card yet.

I've been looking at the Hauppauge line of cards recommended around here and the max. resolution is 320x240. The guy at our towns one computer store says to choose an ATI card, and that it does 640x480 is a much better choice for cheaper.

Ideally I wish to make recordings that I can watch at fullscreen, and archive to discs.

So could someone please recommend something midpriced I don't really want it to go over $250CDN. thanks a lot.

[nickg]

Not sure what you mean by 'max resolution is 320x240' - I think you're incorrect. I've been using WinTV cards for years, and they've all supported resolutions much higher than that, including 640x480 (native resolution of NTSC (US) television), and 740x576 (native resolution of PAL (UK) tv).

However, I can happily watch TV in 1280*1024 as the software scales the video to full screen.

You won't be able to save it to disk in a resolution much higher than 320x200 though, as most PC's can't compress the video that quickly. I can only do 320x200 reliably in MPEG4 on my 1Ghz Athlon, as if I select 640x480, it either crashes or drops LOTS of frames. I don't know if anyone else has had better luck capturing at higher resolutions -I'd be interested to hear.

But yes, I'd strongly recommend the hauppauge cards - they're the most widely supported and some of the others can be very unstable. I haven't tried the USB one... I'd like to see a captured MPEG movie of a USB video tuner as I can't believe USB is fast enough to cope with the data rate.

Nick...

[Thermopyle]

Originally posted by nickg:
Not sure what you mean by 'max resolution is 320x240' - I think you're incorrect. I've been using WinTV cards for years, and they've all supported resolutions much higher than that, including 640x480 (native resolution of NTSC (US) television), and 740x576 (native resolution of PAL (UK) tv).

However, I can happily watch TV in 1280*1024 as the software scales the video to full screen.

You won't be able to save it to disk in a resolution much higher than 320x200 though, as most PC's can't compress the video that quickly. I can only do 320x200 reliably in MPEG4 on my 1Ghz Athlon, as if I select 640x480, it either crashes or drops LOTS of frames. I don't know if anyone else has had better luck capturing at higher resolutions -I'd be interested to hear.

But yes, I'd strongly recommend the hauppauge cards - they're the most widely supported and some of the others can be very unstable. I haven't tried the USB one... I'd like to see a captured MPEG movie of a USB video tuner as I can't believe USB is fast enough to cope with the data rate.

Nick...

USB has a theoretical bandwidth of 12mbits per second. In my experience you can expect around 10 m/bits per second. WAY more than you need.

[shaunf]

STAY AWAY FROM ATI TV-TUNER PRODUCTS!

i've used the original 4MB ATI All-In-Wonder PCI, the PCI ATI TV-Wonder, & the AGP 32M ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon. i've had nothing but headache after headache. you can usually get them to work if you spend enough time tinkering (the AIW Radeon took me well over 48+ of time before i found the right combination of installation of the OS, serive packs, chipset drivers, card drivers, MMC software before it worked).

which hauppauge card works best? is haupaugge what snapstream recommends? anyone able to get their hands on the new Matrox g450 eTV yet? how does that work?

Originally posted by nickg:
...as most PC's can't compress the video that quickly. I can only do 320x200 reliably in MPEG4 on my 1Ghz Athlon, as if I select 640x480, it either crashes or drops LOTS of frames. ...Nick...

Nick, how's your hard drive speed? If you're running your apps off the same drive you use to capture, it could be the problem. I capture lots of raw DV from a camcorder through a Pyro firewire card... tried running it on the same disk as the apps, but too slow. Finally used a RAID 0 striping (2 ATA 66 of 30gigs each to avoid dropping frames. Works like a charm. I used a Promise card, but there are lots of motherboards with the RAID built in. You just add disks. using the 0-striping, even ATA 66 drives can outperform SCSI drives, at a fraction of the price. - John Ebbinghaus

[Rico]

Would you say that SnapStream will give you better quality than the MTV 878 PCI tuner's software? I live in South Africa and we are using PAL (N) color.
You may call me at \\ungerer@sapo.co.za\\