Like a lot of others, I'm looking for some capture card purchase advice. If possible I'm interested in capturing and burning to SVCD. I understand that the best quality could probably be gotten by capturing with no compression and post processing, but my PC is not up to that (K6-2-350, lots of memory, lots of disk)and I'm not ready to upgrade it. BTW, I'm in the US, so it's all NTSC.

There seem to be naysayers to any solution with compression, but I seem to hear people getting good results with the Pinnacle DC10plus and capturing at the highest quality hardware MJPEG setting and then post processing to MPEG2 on an SVCD. Since that board is only $100 I'm leaning in that direction.

Does anyone have experience with the Hauppage WinTV-PVR, which has the built-in MPEG2 hardware encoder? Can you get good results going directly to MPEG2 in hardware and then writing to SVCD? I guess in this same class would be the Dazzle DVC II, but there seems to be a ton of complaining about that box.

I realize that everyone is probably tired of these kinds of questions, but I looked and can't find any comparisions between people's results with MJPEG vs. MPEG2 hardware encoding solutions.

Thanks for any advice!

-- Mark Conrad (mac@pt.com), March 26, 2001

Answers

I just got a WinTV PVR two days ago, and have been playing with it.

My conclusions so far?

Damn good in general, but with a few caveats.

1. Quality - Excellent (I've only tried one MPEG encoder though - so others may think otherwise). Of course, the more bandwidth you can throw at it the better, but in MPEG1, CBR, 2200kb/s I'm getting VHS quality transfers. MPEG 2 is even better. 2. The output stream is weird. Padding occurs in the wrong places, and tweaking it is tricky. Certainly not something you can immediately slap into NERO (I've been demuxing using TMPEG, then remuxing, which fixes a lot of hangs I was seeing on my DVD player, but it won't always accept the stream). If you want to immediately go out and start building SVCDs, XVCDs, and VCDs then this is probably not the card to buy - unless you like blazing trails. Now, in 6 months time, however, things will be a lot better. I'm learning a lot as the days go on. :)

Hope that helps, Si

-- Simon Cooke (simoncooke@earthlink.net), March 27, 2001.

Take a look in this forum

http://pub28.ezboard.com/fdoom9smpegforumfrm16.showMessage? topicID=65.topic

-- spawn (spawn@spawns.dk), April 01, 2001.