Capture cards (1 Viewer)

[Chris Bardon]

I'm looking to pick up a TV Tuner/capture board for the purposes of being able to run game consoles through my PC (no 2nd TV right now) and record TV digitally (and perhaps burn to VCD/DVD eventually). I've been looking at the ATI TV Wonder, since that seems to be the most common one out there. Has anyone got some experience with these products who would like to share some insight?

 

[Dave Poehlman]

Check out VCD Help. They have a lot of info and user reviews on capture cards.
Hmmm.. I never thought about playing game consoles on mine though.. interesting.
I bought an ATI TV WONDER VE on clearance a few days ago. I haven't had time to try and burn any VCD's yet... but, from what I read, it's not the best card out there. I just bought it because it was dirt cheap and I just want to convert analog home vids to VCD and play 'em on the DVD. (also make sure your DVD player will play CD-Rs and/or CD-RWs)
Also, ATI seems a little "microsoft-esqe" by making it difficult to use other capture software with their cards. IE: I tried saving a capture as a .mpg and it will only save it as an "ATI video file". It's probably just a matter of changing the file extension to .mpg, but for someone who doesn't know file extensions, it would only open with the ATI video player.
I guess it really depends how much effort you want to put into making VCDs and what kind of quality you want out of them.
Good luck.
[Edited last by Dave Poehlman on November 08, 2001 at 10:07 AM]

 

[Matt DeVillier]

make sure you get a card that is supported by DScaler (one that uses a Brooktree/Conexant 84x/87x decoder chip). DScaler is the best app for watching interlaced source material (and it's free). Couple that with WinDVR for recording and you are set.
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