I want to try to make VCD from my VHS tapes. Can anybody suggest reasonably-priced and good video capture cards for Windows NT?

I saw that some of video capture cards claim that they can make video CD (VideOh, Dazzle) to be played on PCs. Can the results played on ordinary VCD player too?

How powerfull should the video capture be to make a good-quality VCD (in resolution and frame/sec.)?

Thanks, Maya

-- Maya (muliam@ucs.orst.edu), June 15, 1999

Answers

Sorry, Windows NT 3.51 and 4.0 do not support video capture yet. you have to wait for Windows 2000 Professional(formaly Windows NT 5.0). As for capture cards, many do make Video CDs that are compatible with stand alone VCD players, however for some reason: Snazzi is not compatible with stand alone VCD players but is compatible with stand alone DVD/VCd players. For making your own Video CDs you need Windows 95 or 98, due to Operating System restrictions. Windows NT does not allow hardware to access a lot of information nor does it allow software to talk to hardware directly.

-- the Lone Ranger (rutger_s@hotmail.com), June 15, 1999.

Window NT4 does support video capture. The problem is only the high end capture cards have software written for it.

I have the Matrox rainbow runner and could work on NT4, but since this in not an expensive card, the MJPEG feature powered by the Zoran chip was crippled on Windows NT4.

The MJPEG feature is important since it makes high quality compression of the avi during capturing.

I'm very impressed with the Rainbow Runner. It captured at 352x240 at 30 fps (white book standard rates) without any problems.

The negative side about this capture card is it only attaches to a matrox video card, but then again you won't have to deal with the IRQ headache.

-- (jellyrol@sfsu.edu), June 17, 1999.

After you capture it, you need to encode it with an mpeg encoder that accepts the whitebook standard.

-- (jellyrol@sfsu.edu), June 17, 1999.