Good TV Tuner Card For SVCD Recording?

[FPSguy]

I want to record to SVCD using a TV tuner card. I have a TV Wonder VE card. It is nice enough but it doesn't get high enough resolution. I have a Pinnacle PCTV card. What a headache to get it working! Plus, it doesn't look like it will go to a high enough resolution (even with an Athlon 1.2GHz), and right now I haven't yet solved the high pitched noise it inserts in recordings.

Can anyone recommend a TV tuner card that is good for recording video in SVCD/MPEG2 format, or a review of cards that do that? I see several people in the forum have the Leadtek TV2000. Do you use it successfully to make SVCDs? Does anyone have an opinion on the AverTV cards?

Thanks for any help you can provide. I hate to keep trying different cards until I find one that works ...

 

[PING]

Pinnacle drivers are crap, imho. I use the open source driver for PCTV. PCTV (conexant bt8xx) driver from sourceforge The max resolution is 720X576, which is a lot greater than the driver supplied by pinnasuck. The btwincap driver + virtualdub + tmpgenc is all you need to do svcd.

 

[A6MZeke]

You should not look for TV tuner cards, all are almost the same (Brooktree chipset). All you need is good set of drivers and good software. My favourite is DScaler - because of perfect image quality, thousands of settings and filters. I have PixelView TV Play Pro (TV, Teletext, Nicam, Tuner FM) - I've installed software from PixelView CD, but... I don't use it. So shall others.
Zeke

 

[FPSguy]

Thanks for the input. I tried the BTWinCap drivers. They gave me a nice picture but I had trouble recording with PowerVCR. I also am having trouble getting VirtualDub to do anything. I have gotten DScaler to work periodically but I don't know which tuner the PCTV has and every time I guess one the computer locks up, so I gave up on that (does anyone know which tuner it is?). I will give the BTWinCap drivers another shot and see if I can make them work, though. If anyone knows of a good tutorial on how to make all the pieces work together, that could be a big help. The VirtualDub "documentation" seems to be a bunch of FAQs that don't really explain how to get things working in the first place.

 

[PING]

try vcdhelp.com or divx-digest