Making VCDs and viewingTV

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I'm planning on buying a pinnacle DC-10 card, I heard its a good one and also a cheap one for making high quality VCDs...

Am I still going to be able to view TV on my PC like I could when I used my old pinnacle PCTV?

Thanks!!

-- Etay Avinathan (saeng@netvision.net.il), December 28, 2001

Answers

I've got a DC-10 + capture board. This is only a capture board. It simply has composite and SVHS inputs and outputs. It will capture to your hard disk in AVI format. Then you could edit it and output it back to VHS if your like. I simply use it as a capture tool. I captured my old VHS music videos and concerts etc. I then encode them to VCD compliant MPEG1. Then I burn to CDR with Adaptec Video CD Creator. This card seems to work well for this purpose. Only thing is it will only capture at 320x240 or 640x480. So when you encode to VCD compliant MPEG1....it is inportant to change the resolution to 352x240. Otherwise...your MPEG files will not be VCD compliant...and they will be rejected by Video CD Creator. One great feature about this card is it offers Motion JPEG compression on-board. This means as it captures it compresses the data to MJPEG. The level of compression is user selectable. For VCD's I usually compress to 1500k per second. Seeing as the VCD spandard requires 1150k...this will work fine. This on-baord compression is nice because it reduces the size of the captured data quite a bit. This card has worked with out one problem for almost one year. As long as you source VHS is not to bad...you won't drop any frames either. That is providing your PC is fast enaough. It also comes with very good and feature rich editing software. However I don't use it much as...I primarily capture for VCD purposes. I mainly us VirtualDub for my editing. Which is minimal..and VirtualDub does everthing I need and much more. This card includes no TV tuner..so YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO WATCH TV on your PC. The only way this would be possible with this card...is if you route your cable to your VCR which is connected to the capture card. Then fire up your capture software. You will then use you VCR as the tuner to change channels etc. Hope this helps.

-- Estranged (estranged15@home.com), December 29, 2001.

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