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Good capture card? — Page 2

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In which regard?

If you mean build quality then it is about the same, cheaper cards tend not to have a lot of attention paid to details when designed, it is more about a 'feature list' that looks better than someone elses on paper. So Joe public counts the number of 'ticks' on one list compared to another and buys the one with more things on the list.

It may be fine for you, but the cheaper cards are very power sensitive, so a good supply is a must, and cheaper cards tend to pay less attention to tolerances, so one card may work fine in your particular PC, whereas another may have problems because it is 5% the other way.
So I'd just make sure you can take it back if you don't get an interference free picture.
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Is there a PDI Deluxe for PCI Express slot?

FE<3OT

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No there isn't, only the Hidef analogue cards are coming out in PCIe - there isn't any need for it on an SD/Analogue card.
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Zion, does the PDI card work with a 64Bit CPU and Vista? And do you ever have problems syncing audio?

If I can get away with a much cheaper capture card (which I'd prefer), would anyone have a recommendation besides the Turtle Beach Video Advantage? I'm looking for a card that captures analog VHS using uncompressed AVI and preferably will work in Vista once I upgrade. I'm going with Zion's recommendation of staying away from a DV capture device. So it needs to be a PCI card that does not have a hardware MPEG encoder.

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No, the capture card needs to have drivers that are compatible with x64 architecture.

However, there may be a solution for the bog-standard BT8x8 chipset based PCI cards; see here.

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Before I take the plunge and spend $230+ on the PDI, I'm going to give the WinFast 2000xp a shot. The problem is I have no idea which model to get. I've emailed Leadtek but haven't gotten a response as of yet.

From what I can tell there are 3 models and two additional OEM versions.

There's the Expert, Deluxe and the RM.

The major difference with the Expert is that it has a 10bit decoder, offers FM tuning, additional software but lacks a composite input (it has a composite adapter instead). I've read that this model does capture at 720x480 NTSC granted it doesn't state so on their site.

But I have no idea if the RM or Deluxe versions capture at 720x480. They have an inferior 8bit decoder, but they do have composite inputs built into the card.

Should I just get the Expert irrergardless of the fact I'll have to use an adapter for the composite in?
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Just got a response back from Leadtek..

Seems both the RM and the Expert TV2000 XP cards are 720x480 and have uncompressed avi. There's also a loss in quality by using the composite connector on the Expert. The question now becomes do you guys think the 10bit card with a connector exceeds the quality of capture from an 8bit card with composite built into the card? Any guesses?
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The connector doesn't make much difference, the inbuilt RCA socket is already the wrong impedence, the breakout cable doesn't really make matters any worse.

The xpert 2000 gives OK results, not as good as the PDI but quite reasonable and is very cheap. If you are going for a cheapie card then it is the one to go for.
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Anyone have thoughts on the Hauppauge PVR 150 as a capture card from VHS or analogue video camera? It's on sale fairly steeply from futureshop in canada, and seems to have gotten pretty decent reviews as an inexpensive capture card over at Videohelp.
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The Hauppauge card looks like it encodes to MPEG-2. Convenient for recording and playing back TV, but for serious capturing you'd probably be better with a card that can capture raw video.

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Yeah, it's primarily a tuner, but also is hardware mpeg2. Mostly what I'll need it for is straight capture for output to DVD, with maybe some small amount of editing and CC.
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You really don't want to capture straight to MPEG2, you want a card that can capture uncompressed.
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I managed to pick up a used card TV2000 expert for $30. It's worth a shot to see how it turns out. If it's not good enough for burning to DVD, I'll just pick up a PDI once I'm done building my new PC. Thanks for the feedback.
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So I received the TV2000 XP Expert card today and it's not bad at all. My current PC does a great job of capturing 720x480. I have an Athalon XP 1900+ with 1 gig of ram and a raptor drive. The hitch is, if I capture totally uncompressed AVI, nothing's wrong. But if I add they huffyuv codec, it captures...without frame drops BUT when I go to play it back in Vegas or Media Player it slows to a crawl during playback. I can compress it to something else and it's fine but intial playback is pretty much in slow motion. I'm guessing it's just too much for my PC for whatever reason.

Any ideas why the huffyuv codec would slow playback without dropping frames?
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Huffyuv is not optimised for playback; it doesn't have a DirectShow decoder filter (used by media players to take advantage of video hardware).

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So basically, if I need to preview my edits, it's better not to encode with huffyuv then is what you're saying.
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That depends on whether being able to preview in realtime is more important to you than using lossless compression.

Try installing ffdshow, and using that to decode huffyuv for playback. It may be faster.

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I'll give that a try. I have a feeling due to the amount of work I have in front of me, I'm going to end up needing a 500 gig HD. But for the moment, size doesn't matter during this testing phase. But if I can get away with using compression and actually be able to play it back, that would be ideal since real-time playback while editing is important for this project. Basically, what I'm doing is preserving videos for an obscure band that I've been following for these past 17 years. So there will be a lot of 3-5 minute vids I'll be working with.

Anyway, I'll ffdshow a try. Hopefully, it will help.
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Is there any one out there with access to the appropriate equipment to post screenshots of Uncompressed capture versus M-JPEG, DV, MPEG-2, and any other common capture formats? That way we can all see the compression artifacts and differences and better make the decision of which to use. I suppose the screens would need to be in an uncompressed format (Tiff?) in order to be applicable.
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Although it's a nice idea, in reality such a comparison wouldn't really be practical. I don't know of any devices that are able to capture in raw, DV and MPEG-2, and if you use different devices for comparison then the result might be influenced by the performance of the hardware itself rather than the compression.

A suitable demonstration I suppose would be to capture uncompressed using a PCI capture card, and then encode the same uncompressed source to various different formats.

I might have a go at this in the futurer. The MPEG-2 encodes would obviously have to be CBR.

PNG (lossless) would be the best format for screenshots.

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I'd be most appreciative, if you get a chance.