AIW Rage Pro Turbo Capture Quality Question

[BarnyardMonkey]

I was looking to purchase a Video Capture Card of some sort to copy alot of old home videos on VHS to DVD.

And noticed i had this AIW Rage Pro Turbo PCI Card laying in one of my bench drawers.

Was wanting to know if this thing could be used for what i need?
instead of purchasing another Capture Card.


All i'm needing to do is capture some of these tapes,so i can put them to DVD.
with atleast the original VHS quality.

I've tried the ATI TV Wonder VE before,and it wasn't to good.


Any help on this would be appreciated.


Thanks.



Shawn.

 

[BarnyardMonkey]

Still looking for any info.

 

[mwmorph]

I can attest rage pro is very weak. you probably wont have too much problems with it though because if i understand correctly, the AIW uses a seperate chip to decode video. it will be probably be about equal to your TV wonder VE, maybe a little better. remember, a lot of the quality has to do with software settings too.(in general, it wont be as clean as tape unless you set up settings to a really high amount and is willing to sacrifice a lot of time and HDD space per movie[3 gigs per hour about?, i think thats waht DVrs use.])

 

[VirtualLarry]

Will it work? Yes, if you install the multimedia drivers for it.
Will it look good? Probably not.

I would probably spring for one of those capture cards based on ATI's new RageTheater capture chip (forgot which model - 200? 500? Whatever their newest one is), although if your budget is nearly-zero, then that won't do.

Some of ATI's newer AIW video cards can use their DX9 shaders to "clean up" video (ATI's "VideoSoap" feature), which is supposed to both enhance the visual quality of the captured material, and enable it to compress better. (Less high-freqency noise artifacts in the video stream.)

I have a WinTV PCI (older 848-based model), which is probably on about the same level of quality/features as the original ATI AIW cards. (Used to have one of those too.) I'd say that capture quality is probably a bit *lower* than that of a decent four-head VHS recorder on decent-quality tapes.

I don't know if you are taking about the ISA or PCI version of the ATI TV Wonder VE, but the quality of the old AIW (Pro) is pretty-much similar, IIRC.

For $50, you can get a much more modern PCI capture card, and some of them even have hardware MPEG encode/decode features. ("PVR" cards. Hardware-based MPEG is not so great for editing, but is fine for just bulk recording/playback. Otherwise, spring for one without hardware compression, but one that has 10-bit ADCs for each R,G,B color channel, and can capture at full broadcast NTSC frame sizes at full frame rate. Recent PCI cards can do that. Don't forget, you'll need plenty of HD space, and a fast HD/controller too, and/or a fast CPU, depending on whether you capture, and then later encode, or if you encode in realtime as you are capturing.)

The problem is that this is already a generation loss from recording the original source onto VHS, and then there will be a generation loss during the capture process, and then a further generation loss (controllable) during compression. By using a better capture card (with 10-bit ADCs), you minimize the generation loss during capture, and by doing the compression in software as a secondary step, you can use high-quality multi-pass encoders to minimize the generation loss during the compression step. But that does take a good amount of HD space and a powerful CPU.

OTOH, you could simply just try the ATI AIW card, using their own ATI Video compression codec, or standard MPEG-1, and see what the quality is like, if it is acceptable to you.

Update: Check out this thread. It talks about that new ATI capture chip, and some other various capture and PVR-style cards.

 

[BarnyardMonkey]

Thanks for the info.


VirtualLarry, Would you have any cards in mind for the $40-$50 Price range?

I was hoping this AIW would work since a buddy of mine has the 8500 AIW and says it works good for transfering Home Videos to PC.

Any chance this Rage Pro would be close to the 8500?


But any info you have on a modern/better card to buy in the $40-$50 range,would be appreciated.


The TV Wonder VE i had was PCI.but i was only using the Coaxial Hookup at the time.


Thanks.



Shawn.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: BarnyardMonkey
Thanks for the info.
VirtualLarry, Would you have any cards in mind for the $40-$50 Price range?

Did you read that other thread? There are a bunch of links to some cards. I would personally spend the extra money for that new RageTheater550-based card, myself.
Or get one of those cheap Conexant-based (10-bit ADC) PCI cards right now, if you don't want to wait, I think Compgeeks.com has a few for under $50.

Originally posted by: BarnyardMonkey
I was hoping this AIW would work since a buddy of mine has the 8500 AIW and says it works good for transfering Home Videos to PC.

Any chance this Rage Pro would be close to the 8500?

It's not a matter of the RagePro or the 8500 chip itself, that chip doesn't do the capturing - ATI has another, seperate chip on teh AIW cards, one of their various "Rage Theater" series chips, usually.
I don't know which one is used on the 8500 AIW, but it's probably of a newer generation than the RagePro-based AIW card.

If you don't mind replacing your current video card, there exist R9200 AGP based cards that use a fairly recent version of the Theater chip on them, look for "Radeon 9200 VIVO", those can be had for around $50 or so. Note that they are not called "AIW" cards, because they only have video-in and video-out, but no tuner.

Originally posted by: BarnyardMonkey
But any info you have on a modern/better card to buy in the $40-$50 range,would be appreciated.
The TV Wonder VE i had was PCI.but i was only using the Coaxial Hookup at the time.
Thanks.
Shawn.

Maybe I was a bit too harsh on the AIW, quality issues can be very subjective, if you have the card right now, you could install it and try it out. But the current crop of capture cards is a bit improved over those relatively-ancient ones. (And my ancient 848-based WinTV capture card, which I also would not recommend at this time anymore.)