I've got a WinTV PVR-250 in this computer, and it works really well. Picture quality isn't always the greatest, but that may be a result of the old cable lines and many splitters running through my house just as easily as it could be something with the card. This card sells for ~$150 in stores like CompUSA (where I got mine); I'm not sure what you could find it for online.
The nice thing about it though is that there is an on-board MPEG-encoding chip, which takes a vast majority of the compression load off the system - meaning no dropped frames, even if you're doing something else while the capture is taking place. With my old card (another hauppauge), I had to capture uncompressed video, and it would drop frames if I so much as looked at the system cross-eyed while the capture was taking place. Not to mention that the uncompressed video took up gobs of space. I tried to do on-the-fly compression, but this pegged my system, leaving it unuseable for anything else, and I was still dropping all kinds of frames. And no, I wasn't trying to do this on a pokey, under-powered system. Both cards were used in the
Bebop rig in my signature.
Here is the set-up that I use now:
1) use the PVR-250 card & accompanying programs (WinTV & WinTV scheduler) to capture "standard DVD quality" (6.5~8 mbps, ~3GB per hour of video)
2) use MPEG-editing software to cut out commercials - the card comes with a very basic editor which works well most of the time, but it's not all that stable. I would deffinitely find something better, if you can.
3) use Gordian Knot to convert the video to Divx, or TMPEGEnc to convert to VCD (None of my DVD players will play SVCDs). If you know that the show you want to capture will deffinately be used only on a DVD player, you can set up WinTV to capture straight to a VCD compatible format.
If you do end up with this card, I would reccomend using the drivers & software from
here rather than the stuff that comes on the CD with the card. For me at least, it seems to work much better.
EDIT: I should add that the last time I checked, Dscaler (mentioned in the post above)
did not work with Hauppauge's PVR cards. It works fine with their standard cards though.
Nate
Facebook
Twitter