Radeon 64 VIVO or Dazzle DVCII?

[Compubiker]

Which is the better card for capturing from a VCR with VCD and SVCD burning in mind? I have the Radeon already but thought the dedicated cap card might be better. I tried full length movie capturing about a year ago on the Radeon, but got really bad results and gave up. I am wanting to convert my VHS movies to SVCD for viewing on my home DVD player.
My computer specs are as follows:
Athlon 1.33, Radeon 64MB VIVO, 512MB PC2100, 7200rpm EIDE HD with plenty of space, on-board Iwill audio (great for gaming, unknown for audio quality/sync).

Thanks,
C-B

[Rikimaru]

Hi,

www.vcdhelp.com

There you can find guides how to capture with your ATI in Avi-Format and the guides on Doom9 tell you how to convert to SVCD and VCD.
And they have an list of capture-cards with user-comments,
including a review of DVC II.

DVC II (in Germany it is called DVD.Master)
I had this card for one year. There are proplems with Athlon Systems.
on my Sys it worked; Athlon 1000 with Abit KT7-Raid.
There are two posibilities:
1 The Card will work on an Athlon-System without any ristrictions
2 The Card will not work at all
Nothing between !!! So be sure you can give it back, when you buy it !
I had proplems with the Audio, it scratched. I had to convert the Mp2 stream to wave, normalized it, and after this encode it back to mp2.
First i thought this is because of my Athlon-Sys, but after 3/4 year i had the chance to test the card on a system that is recommended by dazzle; P3 with Bx-Chipset. And the Audio still scrached.
I send it in for repair and never seen the card again. But fortunatelly i got my money back.
I must say, when i played the mpegs on my computer; the Audio sounds fine. But on any Stand-Alone-Player (tried many) the Audio scrached.
Picture-quality:
VCD and SVCD very good. Better then other cards in this price-c.
But when you are a quality-enthusiast capture in AVI-Format (guides on VCDhelp.com) and encode it with Tmpgenc. It takes encoding-time
but you get the best quality.

[Compubiker]

I since have found a few reviews and some user comments on both the DVCII and their DV Bridge. All of the users had very bad things to say about both their cards and their tech support. I think I am going the avi cap and encode route... I am playing around with filters now to weed out some of the video noise.

C-B