Stand alone video-capture card?

[Crankydog]

I'm doing a major upgrade soon and I don't want a video card with integrated video capture. My reasonning? Video capture technology doesn't evolve as quickly as video display technology itself and when I switch videocards, I don't want to pay again for the video capturing options that still worked fine on the old card. For example, if I have an old ATI-All in Wonder and replace it with a newer All-in-Wonder just for the better 3D acceleration, I'm paying again for the All-in-Wonder part all over.

So now I'm looking for a stand alone PCI capture card, that can do full screen capture (up to 720x480) in stereo. Those I see that are at a reasonnable price are usually stuck at 320x240 maximum capture size or record in mono sound (ATI-TV Wonder (I think) and Winfast TV tuner 2000, most Hauppauge lower end cards). And since I don't have any digital video devices, any firewire capture card is pretty useless to me.

Currently I still have my very old Matrox Rainbow Runner that does full screen capture but it isn't perfect and limited to 2Gb files. But I want something better and at a reasonnable price.

Any ideas? Or should I suck it in and take a good AGP video card with VIVO?

 

[TJ69]

Any Bt8xx based card with stereo sound requirements should do the trick. The Bt8xx chipset is capable of capturing at 720x480 but is capped by the drivers to 320x240 (possibly to improve compatibily with older hardware?). To override this bottleneck, install this tweaked driver.

Of course when you do this, the software supplied with your card may not function anymore. For instance, the wintv software will not work with the tweaked driver. But, there are plenty of alternatives. I prefer DScaler above all other TV applications, because of its deinterlace features.

As far as capture/recording software, I don't have too much experience. The link above also supplies amcap, which worked well during my test run. VirtualDub should work well too, though I have yet to try it with this setup.

 

[Crankydog]

Thanks TJ69!

I've bookmarked the link. Now that the 320x240 limit is a thing of the past, I narrowed my choice of a new capture card down to the ATI-TV-Wonder and the Leadtek Winfast 2000 XP. There's only 5$can difference between them.

I'll probably go with Leadtek because of the remote though technically I don't really need the TV tuner part since my TV and VCR are at arm's reach from my computer.

 

[SpideyCU]

Rather than start up a new thread, I thought I'd ask here because I was trying to decide between the very two same cards you are Cranky. From a review I read, it seemed to indicate that the Leadtek is capable of capturing directly to DivX. If I'm right about this, can the ATi card do the same? It's not a big deal, but, hey, I'd rather have that feature than not. Anyone who has either card who can verify this?

 

[Peter]

Well regarding image capture, they're very much the same since they're based on the same chip. BT848 or 878 doesn't make much of a difference. The 878A however is a little more flexible in audio, but neither does stereo without further assistance from a stereo decoder chiplet.

Problem with high resolution image capture is, this family of chips has no compression hardware, so your PCI bus and mass storage will have to cope with the uncompressed stream ... this is quite a lot of data, so you want large and fast HDDs whose controller is NOT on the same PCI bus as the capture card - will say, on a modern board using the chipset's own IDE channels, if we're talking standard boards here.

regards, Peter

 

[SpideyCU]

The review where I saw that you should be able to capture directly to DivX is at http://www.tweak3d.net/reviews/leadtek/tv2000xp/2.shtml. I'm aware of the throughput these things hog as I currently have a POS Pinnacle capture card. Having the hard drives in a RAID configuration helps a bit - not a lot, but it's something. But this Pinnacle card has pitiful support under WinXP, hence me looking for a new solution...if someone has familiarity with the software provided I'd love to hear about it.

 

[Texun]

Just a note about the ATI TV Wonder: I bought one from Newegg and I am sending it back. The problem that I had was ingress due to poor shielding of the tuner. I have a good metal case and yet ingress from off air transmitters produced some very wavy lines on the monitor, and it wasn't a cable issue either. Direct to the TV all was well... connect it to the ATI Tuner and the lines came back. I am on the hunt for another one.

 

[Peter]

texun, actually this is often caused by poor voltage regulation, read ripple on the +5V power supply rail going to the PCI slots.

Spidey, that Pinnacle card uses the exact same hardware ... do look around for independent driver and application efforts for those BT8x8 chips. There is free Windows software floating around for those.

regards, Peter

 

[rbV5]

Here are some Capture Card comparisons, also take a look through this excellent site for a lot of good information on PC video.

Personally, I'll take an AIW over struggling with trying to get a consumer level TV card to play nice with another primary video card. The software is better, the IQ is better, the driver support is better and the feature set is MUCH better. With the AIW 8500 128MB, your not giving up any performance either (actually My AIW 7500 plays every game I throw at it at high resolutions and good framerates), and they hold their value fairly well.

That said, its definately possible to use a TV card to get great captures and encodings, and a wealth of freeware software to get the job done. Your reasoning is sound, and makes sense if you upgrade your video card often. PC Video is very demanding on your rig, and it will bring even powerful machines to their knees and point out any weakness it may have. It takes alot of trial and error to get a workflow that will give you consistent good quality, but its also alot of fun.

Good Luck!

 

[Blain]

I just ordered Leadtek's TV2000 XP Deluxe. It's got a time-shifting feature that the regular TV2000 doesn't. To tell the truth the Deluxe's time-shifting sold me on it. Heck, for $74 I'll give it a try!

TV2000 XP, Users
TV2000 XP, Bjorn3d
TV2000 XP, OC Workbench
TV2000 XP, elite HW

 

[SpideyCU]

Peter, maybe you thought I was talking about the Pinnacle Studio PCTV? Mine is a Pinnacle Studio DC10+. There are no TV features on it, just video capture (composite in/out, s-video in/out). Regardless, I'm going to do as you suggested and look around for independent drivers/software. Maybe I'll get lucky!

Edit: after looking around, I found some decent drivers and software, but there's still no way to capture directly using any encoding scheme save for M-JPEG. I'll probably get the Leadtek just so I don't have to encode everything I capture separately - I'd rather do it in one fell swoop.

 

[Peter]

Oh, that DC10 thing. This predated the Brooktree series chips IIRC. Yes, driver support for those has always been pretty bad. Right from the start as I faintly recall.

If that Leadtek card has encoding hardware on, then fine. If it's the software doing the encoding of the incoming raw data stream, then I see little chance for full resolution grabbing.

Let us know how things went.

 

[SpideyCU]

If it is software, and the results are bad, I'll just capture normally and encode in a second step. As long as it'll have good WinXP support, it'll be a great step up from this current card. In any case, I'll lay out some remarks as soon as it comes in.

Isn't it just my luck too! Newegg had these Leadtek cards refurbished for $45 - people said they got all the accessories with these, no skimping. I go to order 15 minutes later, and it's out of stock (this was yesterday). Now today they don't even list the refurb'ed ones. Nuts! Guess it's full price for me.

 

[Blain]

I just got my TV2000 XP deluxe hooked up and running... COOL, very COOL

 

[alexruiz]

Guys, in no may I am an expert, but my advice is simple:

STAY AWAY fro any card based on a conexant/ rockwell /brooktree BT848 or BT878. The chips are old, and their drivers were designed to work under the old VFW standard. The "new" WDM drivers are not totally stable. They are the only piece of hardware guaranteed to crash the most robust 2000 or XP setup if you do something they don't like.

Once they are tweaked, they work pretty nice. Image quality is not as good as an AIW. If you have a dual boot system with 98/Me and 2000/XP I suggest use them in 98/me for video capture.

Regarding the video data rate, it depends completely of the codec you are using. even those cards (bt8x8) are yuy2 compliant, so any codec that runs well under yuy2 will be helpful. yuy2 is much faster than rgb, and the quality is almost the same.

You could try DivX 5.02, 1 pass quality based at 90%. this gives you an excellent file, but unless you have a P4 2.2 or AXP 2100+ it will drop frames (it is very taxing on the cpu, but data rate is about 1000 Kb/sec, which is pretty easy on the disk). I suggest using a mjpeg codec, they are the fastest, file size is decent and quality is very good (thay can encode 640x480 real time in a PII.... :Q) Pic video with quality 19 will give you 2 megs/sec or morgan / mainconcept mjpeg at 85% quality will give you also 2 MB/sec......

If I were you (in fact, I am in a similar case) I would get a VIVO card. the difference in price between a high-end card with vivo and without vivo is about 15 dollars.

Think it carefully, if you pick a bt8x8 card get ready to tweak the system.

Alex

 

[Crankydog]

Darn it, the Leadtek TV2000 Deluxe is still not out around my parts, yet.

Being canadian makes buying at places like Newegg quite unprofitable (damn international shipping/duties, where's free-trade when you need it?).

When I stumbled upon it on a hardware news site I knew I had the card I wanted.

 

[alexruiz]

Originally posted by: Crankydog

Being canadian makes buying at places like Newegg quite unprofitable (damn international shipping/duties, where's free-trade when you need it?)..

I totally agree.... Where is the NAFTA when you need it??? Hardware prices in Mexico are almost DOUBLE, yes double, than in the USA

 

[alexruiz]

By the way, I had a pinnacle studio PCTV PCI.... the buggiest piece of $hit I ever had :|

 

[Goi]

How come nobody mentioned the Hauppauge WinTV cards? I was also considering those, in addition to the Pinnacla PCTV and Leadtek TV2000XP. AIW cards are out for me due to availability and price over here. Do these 3 cards all use the same chips? How are their image quality/driver support/Win2K compatibility?

 

[SpideyCU]

I echo what Blain said...I really like this card. I have yet to try out all the features (I'll leave it for the weekend), but man, it's nice to finally be able to play Final Fantasy X through my system. No need for a TV in a cramped dorm room next semester.

 

[jarsoffart]

Originally posted by: alexruiz
Guys, in no may I am an expert, but my advice is simple:

STAY AWAY fro any card based on a conexant/ rockwell /brooktree BT848 or BT878. The chips are old, and their drivers were designed to work under the old VFW standard. The "new" WDM drivers are not totally stable. They are the only piece of hardware guaranteed to crash the most robust 2000 or XP setup if you do something they don't like.

Once they are tweaked, they work pretty nice. Image quality is not as good as an AIW. If you have a dual boot system with 98/Me and 2000/XP I suggest use them in 98/me for video capture.

Regarding the video data rate, it depends completely of the codec you are using. even those cards (bt8x8) are yuy2 compliant, so any codec that runs well under yuy2 will be helpful. yuy2 is much faster than rgb, and the quality is almost the same.

You could try DivX 5.02, 1 pass quality based at 90%. this gives you an excellent file, but unless you have a P4 2.2 or AXP 2100+ it will drop frames (it is very taxing on the cpu, but data rate is about 1000 Kb/sec, which is pretty easy on the disk). I suggest using a mjpeg codec, they are the fastest, file size is decent and quality is very good (thay can encode 640x480 real time in a PII.... :Q) Pic video with quality 19 will give you 2 megs/sec or morgan / mainconcept mjpeg at 85% quality will give you also 2 MB/sec......

If I were you (in fact, I am in a similar case) I would get a VIVO card. the difference in price between a high-end card with vivo and without vivo is about 15 dollars.

Think it carefully, if you pick a bt8x8 card get ready to tweak the system.

Alex

I'm trying to capture some video from 8mm tapes (using the Winfast TV2000XP Deluxe) and I have everything hooked up and am able to capture video, but what DivX 5.02 settings would let me save the most quality from the 8mm tapes and not make outrageously large files. One gig per hour is perfectly fine for me, but when I set DivX to 1-pass quality based at 100% the video seemed to be excessively unsteady and it sort of seems to stop and start a bit, but very quickly (could just be psychological). I know much of the unsteadiness is attributed to the lack of stabilization capabilities of the camcorder used to capture the video onto the 8mm, but I think that there is some shakiness that was added in the capture process. Also when it is capturing, the program's screen shows the video stopping and starting majorly (which is why I think it might have transferred over to the captured video). Also, what is GMC and bidirectional encoding and do I need it? It is enabled in the DVD-->DivX 5 guide at everwicked.com. Do I need psychovisual effects? Do I need to deinterlace it? I'm pretty clueless to the settings in DivX; I just follow tutorials.

 

[alexruiz]

If your tapes are 8 mm (not Hi8) don't bother trying anything bigger than 320x240. Set divX to 1pass-quality set to 90% (I had it set in the first post). Don't deinterlace or enable anything else. Quality based in divX will do it pretty nice. 100% is usually tough on the system, and you wouldn't notice the difference in quality.

 

[jarsoffart]

Originally posted by: alexruiz
If your tapes are 8 mm (not Hi8) don't bother trying anything bigger than 320x240. Set divX to 1pass-quality set to 90% (I had it set in the first post). Don't deinterlace or enable anything else. Quality based in divX will do it pretty nice. 100% is usually tough on the system, and you wouldn't notice the difference in quality.

They are actually Hi8 tapes. What should I do instead?

 

[PING]

what does IQ stand for with respect to video capture card?

 

[Goi]

IQ == Image Quality