I mostly want to take regular 8mm video from my old camcorder and turn it into video I can edit, burn to CD, and send out to family or just store on my PC. I am also grooving on my Tivo and would like to experiment with a homebuilt DVR, but I am not ready to build a home entertainment pc just yet. Does anyone have a capture card they particularly like or would recommend?
I have considered buying a digital camcorder to transcode all my analog stuff, but I decided no, because I don’t want to spend that much right now. I am hoping to stay around $150 price point. Also considered an ATI AIW card, but I am mostly happy with my current video card (128mb Ti4400) and am not ready to retire it yet. Plus I don’t want to lose my capture card if I upgrade my video.
So far I am seriously looking at the HAUPPAUGE WINTV-PVR 350 (thanks wumpus!). It could also act as a PVR if I ever string cable TV into my office and I could also get FM, although I am not sure how much I would actually use that feature. It’s a little pricey, but seems to get good user reviews. Does anyone have one?
Definitely the Hauppauge. 250 or 350. The 350 just adds an AM/FM radio tuner, I think, but both encode MPEG2 in hardware.
Beware the ugly, depressing (though tantalizingly inexpensive) world of software MPEG2 encoding. Until 3.0ghz hyperthreaded CPUs are fifty bucks, believe me, you do not want it.
I have the Leadtek 2000 XP card (which can capture in MPeg 2, but I find the quality of that codec to be lacking) and capture both TV and video using the Motion JPEG (MJPEG) codec, (I hear huffyuv is good too) which depending in the quality settings you can obtain a basically lossless capture (albeit a large file footprint on the hard drive).
I then compress the capture straight to Divx (using Virtual Dub, or Dr. Divx) or to SVCD (using TMPGEnc). Both provide excellent results.
The Leadtek card is excellent, and can capture using any video or audio codec installed on the computer (even straight to Divx if you have a spare Cray, or Deep Blue supercomputer lying around) , does a great job deinterlacing input and comes with a remote control and FM radio. I bought one a few months ago for about $100.00 Canadian, which is essentially “Free” in US dollars. :P
Here is the link to the card if you would like to check it out:
With my ReplayTV, I can use the DVR itself as the MPEG encoder (just hook the camera to one of its inputs) and download to my PC for editing. I don’t know if that works for TiVO as well, but if it does, that might be your cheapest solution.
I believe the 350 also adds hardware decoding to the mix. I wonder how important that is? I just use software to watch DVDs (WinDVD) and occasionally I get a hickup on my 2ghz machine. I am not sure if this would be fixed by hardware decoding, though.
Huh. Pretty cool antlers. I can’t do anything like this with my Tivo series 2, but I bet if I had the series 1 I could find a hack to get me here. It’s a little dissapointing that the newer product is so limitted.
Exactly. I meant limited in that I am not going to do the hardware mod to get it to the point where I can add any of the other mods, which there are probably less of just because it’s not as easy to, uh, mod.
Also, the thing I said above about hardware decoding capabilities of the 350 came out all fubar. I meant to say I wonder if a hardware decoder on the 350 will be of any use to my DVD rom for playing back DVDs. It’s all MPEG2, right?
