I would like to hear any suggestions or comments regarding usage of a TV Card (like WIN TV GO or Pinnacle PC TV PRO) or a Video Card with Video-in to capture analog videos from a Hi-8 camera. Capturing in AVI format and later converted by TMPGEnc is fine with me. And burn them into VCDs.

Also, I would like to save TV programs occasionally (like 1 hour TV series).

Would this be the same quality as the cheap Pinnacle Studio VCD PCI or worst? Thanks.

-- John L (boyt_jbl@hotmail.com), May 03, 2002

Answers

ATI cards can do this, but make sure you get a All-in-Wonder type card. Some of the cheaper cards are very limited in functionality. I don't remember the exact models, but some only MPEG-1 captures. AVI conversion to MPEG-1 is very time consuming, in case you didn't know. I have no idea how ATI quality compares to Pinnacle or WIN TV cards. I do think that the DVC II is a superior product that outperforms any ATI card, but the DVC II can not record AVI video (MPEG-1/2 only) and it requires something like a VCR to provide TV services to the card as it has no TV tuner. It does produce excellent results. ATI might be your best solution for an all in one type of card. A bit of warning - ATI does real time software encoding (DVC II does real time hardware encoding with a chip on the card), which uses up a lot of CPU and memory resources on your PC. If you have a low powered CPU, you may have problems with frames dropping, although generally capturing at VCD resolutions (352x240 NTSC or 352x288 PAL) is OK. I can guarantee you that you will NOT be able to capture 720x480 NTSC or 720x576 PAL video with any ATI card because the CPU won't be fast enough to do it without dropping frames. However, if you don't need to capture at DVD resolutions, this may not be a problem for you.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), May 06, 2002.

Ya ATI's are great........i have the ATI All-in-Wonder Pro 128 (AGP) and its works fine...........the recording modes i use most is AVI,MPEG-1, MPEG2 .......but it has more.....like 10 all together but i forget

-- Zachary D (vectornine@aol.com), July 24, 2002.