Video capturing/editing hardware? (1 Viewer)

[Chris PC]

Two questions. 1) What are the best video capturing/editing capable video cards? 2) Are they capable of good de-interlacing/scaling?

Just wondering, what is the industry standard for video capturing/editing now-adays? Is an ATI Radeon AIW 9600 a good card? I could get a Rainbow Runner for G series for my Matrox G400 max video card, for $109 CAD. Is that ancient card totally out of date vs the newer ATI stuff? For instance, how is the ATI AIW 9600XT?

http://shopmatrox.com/canada/product...heet.asp?ID=17

or then there's this:

http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/pro...21AAAD9C9F 0D

I remember that the MSI TV@anywhere and the Flyvideo 2000/3000 were good cards for de-interlacing/scaling. It would be nice to have a robust HTPC capable setup, but thats not my main interest. It would be interesting to know whether or not the modern ATI AIW 9600XT could perform de-interlacing via hardware/software that is as good as Silicon Image 50x or Faroudja.

thanx for any feedback.

 

[DaveNel]

If you are still reading this. Both are good cards
but there is another option as well if you want to
capture with. They make TV cards for under $100.00
they not only capture great, They also do video captures
as well. You can hook up cable, Antenna, VCR and capture
it all including screen captures from whatever you are
doing on your PC.

go to www.hauppage.com to see these cards

 

[Chris]

The Rainbow Runner is completely obsolete, as it capturese in MJPEG, etc. and is not what you are after.

 

[Scott L]

If you're still working with analog the PVR-250 or 150 from Hauppauge provide the best PQ, but AFAIK they only capture in mpeg-2(?) This codec is a nightmare for video editing, where something like like the DV or HuffYUV codecs would be ideal. If that's the case then drop $40 on the Flyvideo 2000. This place has them.

 

[Chris PC]

I remember the MSI TV @ Anywhere and Flyvideo 2000 and 3000 were good cards. People liked them as scalers and de-interlacers too.

 

[Scott L]

well they don't actually do the scaling or deinterlacing. Those tasks are taken care of in software through nice programs such as Dscaler. What's nice about these cards is their chipsets are rock solid and we finally had nice quality, reliable cards that didn't exhibit noise or weird random line problems. Personally I went through half a dozen cards before settling on the 2k. It wasn't fun

 

[Chris PC]

Cool. I'll keep that in mind. Would a Mobile 2500+ running at 1.8 ghz (200 mhz fsb) and 512 MB of PC3200 DDR be good enough or should I take the leap to AMD64?

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Whatever you do, don't buy an ATI "eHomeWonder". This is a TV/video capture card intended for use with XP Media Center edition, which basically consists of a solid-state tuner, ADC, and a MPEG-2 encoder. I got one by mistake, and (a) it is a bugger to use as it is not really supported by anything except XP MCE [I am using VLC on XP SP2 with almost-OK results] and (b) for my purposes - watching Laserdiscs mostly - I would rather not have the MPEG artefacts!

 

[Chris PC]

Ok. I'll stay away from that.

I opted to upgrade my upgrade. I previously had a Slot-A 850 mhz T-bird platform and was upgrading to a socket A 462 Asus A7N8X E Deluxe and Mobile 2500+. I decided since its been 6 years since I last upgraded, I may aswell go the extra mile so I went AMD64. MSI Neo 2 Platinum and AMD64 3000+ (939 0.090 winchester). I'm sure faster 939 CPU's will come down in price in 2005. Until then, I'm imagining this will be fast enough

 

[Chris PC]

Well, I have another post looking at ATI AIW cards, and I'm looking at the AIW (or not AIW) 9600XT or the 9700 Pro (used) or 9800 Pro (AIW or not) or the MSI 6600 gt. In each case, I'd decide AIW or separate capture card. Here is one question I have for here:

Is there a good external USB 2.0 or firewire Capture Card/TV tuner that is equivalent to the Flyvideo 2000/3000 and/or MSI TV@ anywhere and what are the chips they use again? What is the good one and what is the faulty noisy chipset? Philips SAA7114?

The idea would be to combine that with a regular graphics card. Although the graphics card I'm thinking about has VIVO, which will be redundant unless I can find one like it without (MSI NX6600GT-VTD128 GeForce 6600GT w/ DVI, VIVO).

thanx,

 

[Chris PC]

Has anyone used the separate USB 2.0 type TV tuner like the MSI unit? How do they compare with the MSI TV@anywhere and the Flyvideo 2000/3000? What is the chipset that is desireable? Is it the philips chipset?

I ask because I was thinking of using it with the MSI NX6600GT VTD128 AGP card:

Does anyone know anything about the MSI NX6600GT VTD128? Here are the good things I see with this AGP card:

1) Very Fast. Faster or comparable to the best of the midrange cards like 9700 and 9800 Pro and XT.
2) DVI output and DVI to VGA adapter.
3) Multiple monitors. Does this equal DUAL-MONITORS like Matrox's DualHead?
4) VIVO. Has composite IN and S-video input. Works with MSI TV tuner capture deally.
5) Not too power hungry. Guessing about 18 watts idle and 50 watts 3D game max. Apparantly with "cool bits" you can reduce the clock for non-3D games so during regular 2D applications you use even fewer watts.
6) A few dollars cheaper than ATI 9800 Pro.

Only "drawback" of this card is compared to AIW cards, there is no TV tuner and no remote unless you get the separate TV tuner capture deally. So thats why I wonder what the separate USB 2.0 MSI tv tuner is like.

thanx in advance for any feedback,

 

[ChristopherDAC]

I would say, do not use an outboard Video capture device. 1394 connection might be OK, but my research has told me that USB-based units quite often lose sync, or suffer the inverse of the Buffer Under-run errors one gets with USB CD drives. They just don't have the data transfer to push video into your machine reliably, at least not with any kind of quality, and tend to be awkward to set up as well.

 

[Chris PC]

Really? I've not heard that before. 480 MB/s for USB 2.0 should be more than enough bandwidth. What experience do you have or are you aware of. If anything, the feedback is good and I can remember to stay away from particular models etc.

 

[Chris PC]

Does anyone have a list of TV tuner/capture cards and their features? It seems there are many. I would like to try an external USB 2.0 or Firewire model but I will research and keep my eye out for loss of synch problems.

So what are the good cards?
MSI TV@anywhere?
LeadTek WinFast TvTuner 2000
Flyvideo2000/3000 (nobody gets the 3000?)
Which chipset is good and why? Philips vs conexant?
Do these do lossyless recording?
Do the PVR hardware MPEG encoders like Happauqe have ok compression?

What about this?

http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/pro...4&newdeptid=18

thanx

 

[Jose Martinez]

I suggest this:
http://www.atitech.com/products/tvwo...ite/index.html
or
http://www.sapphiretech.com/vga/theatrix.asp
or any tuner based on the ATI Theater 550 Pro chipset.

I currently have an MSI TV@Anywhere card and is pretty good but I just ordered a Sapphire Theatrix which I can't wait to try.

 

[Chris PC]

I guess what I really need to know is:

1) Which solutions do hardware vs software MPEG encoding and which do lossyless-raw encoding? Which file format does that end up as?

2) Which ones have a 3D vs 2D comb filter for the composite and TV tuner capturing?

3) Is USB 2.0 ok?

thanx for the feedback

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Raw lossless packing is genrally output as "HuffYUV" which uses a variant of Huffman entropy coding.

 

[Chris PC]

Heard of that. What can I do with it? Can I store it and make several attempts to make DVD's with it? I imagine if you use hardware or software MPEG encoding, you make a playable file that you can burn onto a DVD, but you're stuck with the MPEG encoding quality that is done. With raw encoding I guess you can save the file, however huge it will be, then edit it, and then encode it later using an encoder which you can upgrade over time. For instance, is there a benefit to raw encoding or is it just another option that I shouldn't worry about?

MPEG2 is dvd format correct? I'm just wondering if there is one card or the other which does better MPEG encoding than another, software or hardware. Some people like the capture cards like the ATI tv tuner, flyvideo and msi, or leadtek or numerous others, or the ATI AIW while others prefer hardware encoders. Just wondering which is better. I guess I'll just have to get something and try it and see.

I may and see about the Sapphire Theatrix or ATI or other 550 based card. They're only $115-ish CAD up here. If they work well, they may be a great solution. Heck, hardware encoding and 3D comb filter sounds nice.

Let us know when you give it a try
Test both the TV tuner recording and external video input recording if possible