Im thinking of picking up a WinTV Theater for video capture? Any opinions?

[jediphx]

Good choice?

Some people have said to get a mpeg2 hardware encoder but I only have like $160 to spend so I guess thats out

 

[jamesbond007]

Bump for a good question as I was looking at this for my new computer as well. FM Radio is another plus.

(Foreal, it is. I like my radio stations. )

 

[Balt]

Only 2 reviews here.

You might also find some on epinions.

Edit: If you want to check out other vid capture options, that site (vcdhelp) has user reviews of many of them.

 

[jamesbond007]

Hmm. How about the Dazzle DVC II? That's not TOO expensive, IMHO, but it does seem people like it more.

Anyone have any experience with this one?

The people who commented say this card has crappy software, but works great. More In/Outputs, too.

 

[Prospero]

That card will work very well for video capture. Get the WinTV 401, and use AVI_IO for the capture software. The registered version is probably the best $25 I ever spent. For rendering, I would recomend VirtualDub. It also has capture ability, but AVI_IO has the ability to timer record and seems to hold audio synch a little better. For capturing, motion jpeg is a good format with this being the version I recomend. If your system has fast enough drives, and enough space, you can go with Huffyuv. It's a virtualy lossless compression system but takes about 9 megs per second sustained writes. The WinTV 401 costs around $100, AVI_IO is $25, VirtualDub is free, and the picvideo mjpeg codec is $18. This is within your limit, and would be highly versatile. There are other free software programs that can render to mpeg2 if you need that. VirtualDub cant output that. Here is a clip of something I did with the software I mentioned. It's a little less than four megs done in mpeg4v2. My card is a Matrox G450eTV, but it will look the same as the Hauppage with this software. Good luck and happy capturing.

Prospero

 

[jediphx]

prospero, I ran the clip it looks NICE but I hear no audio at all. im plsying it with media player 7.1

what codec was that done with? also the clip played very very fast

 

[Prospero]

It's Mpeg4v2 (microsoft) with ADPCM audio. That's strange, but try this player as it beats the holy hell out of media player, any day. The clip plays beautifully on my machine.

Prospero