Help! TV capture video card needed.

[Murpheeee]

I want to buy a new video card to record from TV.

I would like one which I can plug my cable line into and capture television programs.
Nothing too extravagant or expensive.....Anyone have any suggestions/recommendations ?

 

[NTB]

Sounds like the Radeon AIW would fit the bill, but that's not exactly a cheap card. Can the WinTV cards or other tuners do capture? I don't remember

 

[Parser]

Or if you want to keep your old video card then you can get the ATI TV Wonder. I'm using it in Windows 98SE and have had no problems(I've heard the cards Win2K Drivers are suspect though)

The only real problem is that if you want to get the best picture quality you have to go with the AVI format and those files are just huge(Gig a minute) or you can take a slight performance hit and go with the MPEG-1 encoding.

I don't really record from TV much but if thats what you want the card for my suggestion would be to record in a high level mpeg and maybe convert it into a managable size with some other program.

I here the AIW has better capture formats but you'd be buying a whole new vid card.

 

[gygheyzeus]

Definitely recommend the ATI TV Wonder. I have one... it works pretty good. You can set how compressed you want the video to be and everything.

 

[Murpheeee]

Does the ATI TV Wonder come witth the software you need or do you have to buy a program ?

 

[Parser]

It comes with the software for AVI and MPEG-01 but if you want to convert those to a more managable size you'd have to get some other program(I never really looked into it much)but gygheyzeus is right you can modify the quality of MPEG-01 recording to make the size much more manageable. Depends on how important the picture quality is to you.

 

[Murpheeee]

I've been looking at prices...TV Wonder is about $80, while TV Wonder VE is $50.....anyone tell me whats the difference?

They both seem to do the same things.

Thanks

 

[Parser]

As far as I know the difference is that the VE can only capture in AVI format. As I said before is a gig a minute and you can't change the quality level to make the size more manageable so unless you have a couple of massive harddrives sitting around you'll never be able to capture any long program.