Video Capture Noobie

[SkyDiver]

Hi All,
I'm trying to move all my Hi-8 analog videos to MPEG-2 DVDs. I've read some posts here and elsewhere, but I have a couple of specific questions that I didn't see answered.

First of all, what is the best PCI analog video capture card for $100-ish? I've heard that the Hauppage PVR 150 is very good. However, I've heard that it has problems with audio. This is what is driving me crazy with a cheap Avermedia card that I got for free after rebate. Since the audio is recorded right into the MPEG file, I don't know how to fix it. (And I don't have the time to learn, either.)

Second, I have Roxio EZ Media Creator 7. None of the sites that review DVD authoring software even mentions Creator 7. I know it is for noobs like me, but it seems to have all that I need. Is there any reason I should consider getting a more robust software tool? I'm just trying to get the video onto DVD to save it.

Would it be worth considering a card that supports DIVX? I know that is an upcoming standard. Or will software take MPEG 2 to DIVX from a file on the HD? What about a hardware MPEG 2 decoder? What is the main benefit of that?

Any comments on any part of this post are very welcome.

Thanks!

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: SkyDiver
Hi All,
I'm trying to move all my Hi-8 analog videos to MPEG-2 DVDs. I've read some posts here and elsewhere, but I have a couple of specific questions that I didn't see answered.

First of all, what is the best PCI analog video capture card for $100-ish? I've heard that the Hauppage PVR 150 is very good. However, I've heard that it has problems with audio. This is what is driving me crazy with a cheap Avermedia card that I got for free after rebate. Since the audio is recorded right into the MPEG file, I don't know how to fix it. (And I don't have the time to learn, either.)

Second, I have Roxio EZ Media Creator 7. None of the sites that review DVD authoring software even mentions Creator 7. I know it is for noobs like me, but it seems to have all that I need. Is there any reason I should consider getting a more robust software tool? I'm just trying to get the video onto DVD to save it.

Would it be worth considering a card that supports DIVX? I know that is an upcoming standard. Or will software take MPEG 2 to DIVX from a file on the HD? What about a hardware MPEG 2 decoder? What is the main benefit of that?

Any comments on any part of this post are very welcome.

Thanks!

Well, first off, you seem to be missing a lot of basic info. I'd check out www.doom9.org for more information on encoding, different encoding formats, DVD authoring, etc.

I doubt you will see a whole lot of difference in capture quality between cards when dealing with old home movies. Generally the signal's not that good to begin with. For the most part, any two cards using the same chipset will produce more-or-less identical output.

I have a PVR-150 (two, actually), and they work fine (other than the occasional glitch with BeyondTV, but I don't think this is the cards' fault). They only do MPEG2 capture, however, and cannot capture uncompressed video. This is fine if you want to author to DVD (which requires MPEG2), but if you want to do things like online distribution (where the large size of MPEG2 is a drawback), it might make more sense to get a software capture card and either capture straight to MPEG4 (or whatever codec you want, such as WMV9), or capture uncompressed and then work from that (although this takes a HUGE amount of hard drive space, and encoding can take a while).

I haven't done a whole lot of DVD authoring (I use the cards in a PVR box), but if you don't want to do anything fancy, I'm sure the software you have will work fine. Mostly the nicer authoring tools also include editing, fancy menu creation, etc. in the same package.

 

[SkyDiver]

Thanks for the information and the link. I guess I really need to dig in and study!

 

[Traire]

I hear good things about the capture cards with ATi's new Theater 550 chip, I have been looking at buy the Powercolor 550 card myself. Anand is working on a review of a Theater 550 card, and hopefully will have it posted soon.

 

[SkyDiver]

Wow, the Theater 550 chip sounds pretty good from some of the reviews I looked at. I didn't see any that addressed the Video Capture capability much at all.

The reviews I saw said that the software was very poor. If the card is good, I can use Roxio as the software, right? Does the driver communicate the options to the software?

 

[Traire]

Depending on which brand you buy, the software that comes with it will vary. I have been using ATi All in Wonder cards for a long time now, and really like the ATi Media Center software for watching tv and for recording video. Even if you buy a T550 card from a company other than ATi (I plan on getting the PowerColor branded card), you can still download the ATi software and use it (which is what I will do). All the T550 cards regardless of what company made them are virtually identical hardware wise to the actuall ATi brand cards, they just have different stickers on em.

But any software that does video capture should work. So if you dont like the software that comes with your card, and you dont like the ATi media center you can download, you can pick up pretty much any other video editing software from the store to use.

The 550 chip does hardware mpg2 encoding and handles the sound encoding on-chip as well, rather than relying on software or the sound card. That means that you should not have to worry about audio/video getting out of sync in long recordings, something I have had problems with in the past with cheap video capture devices.

Once you get it to an mpg2 file, you can burn it with Roxio to DVD, or transcode it to pretty much any other format you want. http://www.doom9.org has tons of transcoding utilities to convert one format to pretty much any other format. If you dont have domm9 bookmarked yet, you should. Its one of the best places to find utilities and get general DVD help on their forums.

 

[SkyDiver]

Thanks for all the help, Traire.

I just wanted to let you know that I read a review at firingsquad.com which says that ATi software does NOT work with this card.

For now, your only option is to upgrade to the full version of PowerCinema, or purchase other third-party PVR software such as SnapStream?s BeyondTV, Multimedia Center didn?t work with any of the THEATER 550 PRO cards we tested.

Since the TV watching isn't as important to me as the video capture, I just bought the Sapphire version of the card. I thought you might want to know about the software issue.

Thanks,

 

[kini62]

Most of the cheaper analog capture cards have audio sync problems. Buyer beware.

For starter software, Premiere Elements is very good.