I've tried to research this, but before I spend the little money I have I'd like your oppinions. I have a PIII 500 with lots of hard drive space, and time is not an issue to me. However, what I would like to do is create fairly high quality vcds from home videos and video cassets. So, should I go with the Dazzle or the G400. I've also been looking into buying one of the two used, and I've found there are a lot more Dazzles availible used, which provides substantial savings.

Also, quality and performance wise, what is the difference between using a USB or a parallel port. Thanks for your help.

-- John (johntucker@home.com), May 11, 2000

Answers

I have just gone through the same situation and let me save you time by saying the Dazzle sucks. I just replaced it with the G400 and the difference is like night and day. I had the Dazzle USB so I can't put down the parralle port Dazzle but how much better can it be. With the USB Dazzle I got a digitized look that made me want to not bother trying to make VCD's. Then I used the G400 to capture AVI vs MPEG and then convereted them to MPEG with the Panasonic encoder.(I tried the Xing and it sucked compared to the Panasonic) You can also get the G400 at WWW.outpost.com and get free overnight shipping.(I ordered at 10 at night and got it at 10:30 the next morning. Good luck. '

-- Brandon (thxext@earthlink.net), May 11, 2000.

i own the dazzle usb, but to get great results with it, you have to capture using a bitrate close to the dazzlesmax (3000 i use 2900) from here you then re-encode to vcd or a highrate. So for me i sort of use the same method as many avi capturers use. i have heqr quite a few good things aboutthe matrox and know some people who own it. they are all happy. the one downfall they didnt like is the amount of space some of these movies take up. However as for the dazzle you really shouldnt have to do the method like i do to get good results. Thats where many people hate the dazzlre as it has a template for vcd but the quality used to capture at the vcd rate looks horrible.

-- Doug (mazinz@aol.com), May 11, 2000.

here here Doug....If you want quality...you've to play with the hardware/software to achieve it. Quality just don't just jump out at you even with high prices hardware. It's a give or take kinda way. Play with it a while to find the sweet spot...As i said before, the Dazzle is a decent encoder for it's price tag!!!! I've made killer VCD from VHS with this hardware as well.

-- lnguyen (wingstarzz@hotmail.com), May 11, 2000.

First try considering more options than the two listed. As for quality I can recommend only one card Broadway. Try finding a second hand one as it is not cheap. Alternate solution would be to find any decent capture card (Matrox is one)that is capable of capturing hi quality AVI files of 352x240 / 352x288 resolution then using software encoders to convert to VCD format. I heard that the Panasonic encoder is quite good. The price here is time and space as there is the 2GB limitation on AVI while encoding using software usually takes 4-5 times the duration of the video.

-- Rodolph Schwenzner (rodolpho@emirates.net.ae), May 11, 2000.

Well, I've used the Dazzle, I have the G400, I had an MPEGator Pro and I have a Optibase MovieMaker Plus. Also, I've seen the output from a Vitec RT-6 board.

For the money the $289 Matrox Marvel G400 TV can produce similar results to the $4000 Optibase MovieMaker Plus if used properly. Everything else I've used just doesn't compare.

The trade off is price=speed. I do real time encoding now with the Optibase MovieMaker Plus. The same results on the Matrox/Panasonic takes 10+ hours on a 450MHz P3.

To get good results with the Matrox I capture at 704x352 @ 30 fps @ 3MB/sec. Then encode using the Panasonic encoder to VCD specs. The resutls are as good as the Optibase MovieMaker, it just takes 10 times as long.

I would get the G400 TV.

-- Michael S. Gilmore (mgilmore@san.rr.com), May 13, 2000.