SVideo Analog Capture to h.264

[jfsecure]

We are going to be doing some high quality H.264 captures of high action sports scenes. The source is DV being output via SVideo, this is completely oustide our control. Based on what I have read in the forums it should not matter what card we choose to use for our capture device. I am thinking an ATI 9800 should do the trick nicely. Can anyone see a reason for using a different capture card that will not be doing any encoding on the card itself.

Perhaps users are having better results with NVidia or Matrox capture cards?

[Qjimbo]

Depends whether you want to encode direct to H.264 or not, I don't know if there are any cards that can do that anyway, but yeah any card should work. If you ever do get an alternative to SVideo like RGB there's a great little tunar card called the sweetspot http://www.pluggedin.tv/sweetspot/

EDIT: Hmm I don't think that card actually does HDTV. So you probably want to disregard that.

[jfsecure]

The sweespot card looks interesting. From what I can tell it will help with my output and I would still need to capture with an ATI or equivalent card. My thinking now is to perhaps capture with a lossless codec and use some sort of "watch folder" script with AVI Synth to automatically encode the video once it is done capturing.

I'm interesting in your comments of RGB, are you saying you have had better results using an RGB type input vs sVideo? Or are you referring to composite video?

[Qjimbo]

Oh you always get much better results with RGB, it's what computer monitors use, so you get close to pixel perfect quality. One thing I'm not sure about is whether that card actually works with anything other than DScaler, meaning capturing with it might be awkward (since DScalers recording leaves much to be disered). I've never actually used it, just heard a lot of positive stuff about it.