MSI TV@Anywhere or the Leadtek Winfast Card?

[Sgt_Strider]

Hi, I'm trying to decide which card to get to watch TV on my computer and capture vhs tapes into avi. Btw does either of these cards have the ability to pick up satellite signals as well? Right now I'm not sure if I'll be sticking to cable as I may get satellite TV soon.

[dar1us]

This seems familure, try search. I swear we had one of these a few weeks ago. Same cards n' all.

I'd say MSI on experience and value.

-dar1us

[Eagle117]

I have the MSI card, and it is ok. Image still seems a bit grainy, but maybe it is just showing the lack of quality of my cable provider. I know the MSI card doesn't do sattelite signals, but if you have a sat box, and can run s-video or RCA out, you can go into the tuner like that.


Don't pick up the MSI card for it's suposed MPEG-4 capture. All a hoax. If it does, it is ASF format, and you can't change the quality of it's recording like that. I haven't tried this part yet, but you are supposed to be able to broadcast the TV over your network, so if the PC with the tuner is in the living room, you could watch TV in the bedroom if the computer was networked together. That could come in handy later. The MSI remote works, but I find it lacking in features, such as record, sleep timer, and others.

I kinda wish I picked up the Winfast card as I have heard many great things about it, and I bought the MSI card so I could tell people about it, since I hadn't heard anything when I purchased it.

[dar1us]

It captures mpeg-4 fine, if you read the documentatation, you will find that it not only captures mpeg-4, but broadcasts it around the net.

To explicitly capture mpeg-4, this has to be done with third party software.

Cant capture to mpeg-4 my ass! The software cant aggreed, but any card with WDM/VFW will.

Satellite signal, do you mean a DVB capture, what do you expect for 35 GBP (50 dollar). For a DVB setup, you are looking into about 200 quid for a decent one, 100 on top of that if you require cams/common interface. I know it can all be done for under 100, but you only get FTA channels, yay. CNN-Europe all the way baby, with the obvious addition of that bloody Game-Network, the Italians really made some mistake there, though respect to Italy, shall be my next holiday destination in easter, SKIING!!!:), if you dont like it, then you cant ski and probably would never be able to, simple as that.

Less of that, noise, what about denoisers. The noise is what the source is actually giving, if you have decent cables, then it cant be bad at all. What would you prefer, some really poor noise combing/software denoiser built in to whatever you use, or some professional looking end result with all the detail you could ever want?

Detail wise, this card rocks, noise wise, this card seems bad, but it doesn't blur the image, that is the trick. Most cards blur the image to account for obvious noise, to the untrained eye this will look good, but I am sure that you don't fit into that catogary. In the olden days, noise used to be the enemy, now grain allowing decent detail is your friend. It is exactly the same grain that you see on a DVD, remember, DVD applications do some poor stretching, using own bilinnear/cubic algorithms, this visually looses detail, but at the original res, sharp as hell.

Remember that grain is added to show how good sources are, not blurry. You can always run a really low power denoiser to rid of the grain but retain quality.

I am not knocking the WinFast, but that is more like 100 pounds as opposed to the 35 I paid for this beast.

The only thing I find the card dislikes is interlaced material. You get some really funky artifacts on such sources, because it tries to retain as much quality as possible, instead of grooming the picture surface, it needs a lot of power and the analogue to digital converter SIMPLY cant handle it so leaves bits out, also heaven forbid, the codec you use may not be preforming to great effect.

Hope this helps a bit.

-dar1us

[Eagle117]

Since you seem to know more about the MSI card than I do, maybe you can help me with this.

I see where there is an MPEG-4 profile to capture into, but it seems to stay a constant 320x240 at 256kb bitrate. If I could only change this around, my opinion of the card would go up greatly. I know I can use other program to do DivX or MPEG-4 conversion, which is how I do it now.

At the moment I capture to a high quality MPEG-2 and then Gordian Knot it into DivX 5 for storage.

Also, does your TV@nywhere card send out some crackling or poping noise when the card is not in use? I had to exchange my first card and now both the old and new one do this from time to time when I access the HD or other random things.

Overall, I was expecting this card to be the holy grail of tuner cards, and in my opinion, it is nothing more than a standard tuner with some commercial software (WinDVR) with a mod for it to do broadcasting. Not to mention that MSI's site layout is horrible and tech support takes forever to get back with me.

But that is just my opinion, I could be wrong.

[dar1us]

iuVCR is minimised now - Capturing Voyager from SKY|ONE


I get none of this 'popping' - look through the forum for more details regarding this phenomenon (sp?)

I pretty much have a complete grasp of this card now, I know all the tricks and disibilities. Though I havn't played much with the built in software, though I do note that Timeshift with a Remote was BLOODY useful. I dont watch TV on it, though if I did, this would be funky.

The capture profile is on the spot encoding to MPEG-4 at a low enough bitrate that it can be easily transmitted through the internet, I have ISDN, so none of this for me. My internet power comes from the decent supply of free internet space hosted in your's truely's country, the UK and all I can say is that it damn fast. I pick up 240k (max speed for my account at my 'learning zone') and I know that it maxed out a friends download speed in Sweeden, she has 10mbit. We got 1.2meg a second off it.

The tuner is pretty decent as I saw it, I watched a little of Chicken Run, on BBC1 over christmas and it seemed very good quality. Compared to my TVWonder VE, it rules. For what I paid, this is officially the holy grail. Respect.

If you want to see some decent samples from many cards, I suggest you study this thread and pause all your downloads, there is like 100 megs at least from about 8 (possibly 10, havn't kept track) capture cards which are all showing basically the highest quality capture possible (bar IVO, yes you know who you are;) jk:)).

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=39432

I really had hoped that this thread would have taken off even better, what is more important than quality? It allows people to do some realistic direct comparisons. Reviews never EVER show picture quality, only a list of features and a VALUE, how are we supposed to know what a reviewe' of a card comes to expect, maybe he is familure with the likes of the TVWonderVE, then gets thrown something (a little more modern) like the WinTV Primo (whatever it is) and thinks it is "the same as DVD, unbelieveable": the amount of times I heard that. Grr. Maybe I should review cards for a living, I am sure I could get busy (not in the American way) and pump some decent quality info out. If only the card makers could see some potential and hire me:) - Dreaming... WAKE UP!

I have to start downloading other peoples samples so I can upload them to the magic space.

Hope this helps

-dar1us

[\AX]

my MSI tv@nywhere? has been sitting in my linux box for the last
3 months...im going to follow this thread. See if any result's turn
up with the card.

imo i thought dscaler captured better than them all with the MSI tv@
at the very end of my rope with it.

good luck with driver support..huh. I actually about 2 months ago got
ahold of a real live person that "officially" denied me any disclosure
about the chip's architect. MSI wont update the driver for it since
i presume they are going to scratch support for it and move onto a
"new" capture card.

MANY people are not to found of me over at
the MSI forum's...i beated their forums to hell and back in the
fall/winter looking for help...they all suk and "it's all troow"

there is one enlighten thing however...the code i compiled for
dscaler has some "usefull" code that could be, with the right person
utilized and create a new driver...but i dont know anybody but 1
person that would try that (creator of the btwincap).

if you got the time look over my older thread here in regards to this
card...i had MANY issue's with it on windows 2000/98. But your right, it
produce's excellent results off a satellite box via s-video...that is
for sure. And the cost is nutty for what you get.

[prom3theus]

Hi Darius, thanks for the link to the comparison thread. I have an ati all-in-wonder radeon 7500 and it seems like it really is one of the least liked capture cards. I've only ever used AIW cards for the convenience back when software mpeg2 decoding was really not viable. Now though, it seems like a good choice would be to get an msi card and a half decent 64MB video card, but I'm clueless here in those waters.

In your experience with this card, would you say the silicon conexant tuner seriously outperforms something like the analog philips tuner on the ATI (7500 and below)? Of course I don't like paying for the crap software that comes with ATI, so what does MSI come with? anything good or do I still use iuvcr?

Also, what are the supported hardware formats? I can't find a damn word anywhere in any MSI documentation (including the user's "manual" for the tv @anywhere, which is a two page quick install guide) which mentions the actual formats supported in hardware. I am used to capturing in yuv mode with my ati, which gives huge file sizes, then encode later, two pass, filters, etc. Can MSI in pci bus handle this kind of capture format?

Finally, in your opinion, is it better to go with an msi + agp card over the all in wonder 7500ish? It is about half the cost of what i paid for my AIW. If I buy a separate video card, what kind suffices? Is the video playback and mpeg2 decoding handled by the tv card or the video card?

[Eagle117]

I would have to suggest against the MSI card. MSI's support is horrible if you are trying to find any information about it and very slow in response to problems.

As far as hardware support, I don't believe it has any. It is all software based capture to MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and it sorta captures into Microsoft ASF MPEG-4. The best way I've found is to capture to MPEG-2 with 6000 bitrate and then use Virtualdub to Nth pass DivX with filters. I need the filters because of all the noise I get with this card. My TVs show up crystal clear and my previous card was very smooth, so I blame the MSI card for that.

I've heard nothing but good things about the Leadtek card, which is the one I would get if I was buying one now, but ATI just released a new version of their card, the TV Wonder Pro, which looks very appealing to me. Includes the Remote Wonder which I'm very happy about and some other cool features like videosoap to clean up the video. I don't think it is available yet, but as soon as it is, I'm ditching my MSI. I"ll sell it to you then if you want. Heheh

http://mirror.ati.com/products/pc/tvwonderpro/index.html

[prom3theus]

What I am wondering, based on some horror stories I've read in the forum, is if the MSI can be used to capture in "raw" formats (yuv, yuy, which means huffy also as compression on top of the format) and with basic/generic applications, like virtualdub, using any combination of vfw filters and such, or other methods. I don't capture in highly compressed formats regardless of cards because of multipass encoding options.

<edit>
Oh, I just checked the leadtek tv2000 xp deluxe and it looks great! At least it actually seems to have some real specs. Guess I gotta do forum search for leadtek now:)

[dar1us]

I am under the impression that these people dont know how to even logon. I have had no problems with it at all. One to start off but that was quickly fixed.

The quality is fine. But if you believe everything you hear, be my guest and get the WinFast, I am not saying it is poor or anything, but the MSI works a treat.

[Owen]

I have been using the TV@anywhere card since it was released.
It replaced my BT8x8 TV card.
Quality is very good using Svideo input.
Can't comment on tuner. Never used it.
As for noise,there is none in my system.
I found that noise is only a problem with slower systems.
All the older PC's I have owned,from P2/450 P3/700,800,1Gig, Athlon 1.4Gig all suffered from noise pickup on Svideo input.
When I upgraded to P4 2Gig and now 3Gig, noise is a thing of the past.
The TV@anywhere, like most modern cards uses WDM drivers.
This means that VFW applications like Virtual Dub cant cant be used for capture unless you use the VFW wrapper that limits capture to only half resolution and gives bad performance as well.
VFW is DEAD. Lets bury it once and for all.
WDM capture applications like iuVCR,FlyDS and Virtual VCR work great.
I capture PAL 768-576 direct to Xvid or DIVX at maximum bitrates with near original quality.

Image quality is so good from this card that I can run the video signal over Svideo cables from my digital Sat receiver to the MSI card and display it full screen using Dscaler then connect the TV output on my Gforce card to my Toshiba rear projecton TV and compare the picture to the same Sat reciever connected directly to the TV.
There is almost no differance between the signal running through the computer A/D and D/A conversion and that comming direct to the TV from the Sat receiver.
Thats good enough for me.

Regards,

Owen

[dar1us]

/me bows

aye aye capn'

I got a lot of noise with S-Video but it is my sat box's fault, mu 7108 overblurs the noise, but then it isn't visible, this isn't really the ideal solution.


dar1us

[\AX]

i have to agree with Owen and Dar1us on that one. The MSI card produce's great results...however it must be system dependent like everything else. I have seen several threads stating such and such user's where getting noise problems and alot of other stuff wrong.

See i run a 1.33ghz amd k7. Now i tested it in a dual p3 setup and a 2.0ghz system (amongst several other pc's i could use from the lab). The overall performance for me did NOT show this noise at even one time. But since soooo many people state they have noise and the like i would have to believe them. However alot of the people that stated there was noise never listed what application they were using. The default IntervidCrap or whatever comes with it is hands down the worst i have ever used. Noisy and just plain BAD! all around.

I gave it a shot in over a dozen systems and did NOT get what i wanted...vfw support at 720x480 in avi_io or vdub. I too capture in huff and did not look for any mpeg substitute being i dont want that.

I tried a k6 250 even...great picture. I tried it in that box only for the fact it had win98 and might support vdub at the res i wanted...no love.

I also gave it a shot with atleast 10 different pieces of software...only amcap was right for me.

I have had the card since seriously a week after it was released (from my knowledge of MSI's support..so take that for what you will if you know what i mean)...and not once i have i heard of people getting great results with a 1.33ghz or lower. My fastest system is a 1.33ghz...i would get asynch a/v capturing at 720x480 huffyuv after like 40 or 45 minutes. Now if i put it on a timer to skip commercials (which is a long shot of not missing footage) it will work great.

MSI without like a 1.7ghz or faster...just doesnt cut it in my experience with this card. A 2ghz cpu will work great. If you get noise with the card that is a mystery to me...because i never experienced that. I will safely say in my opinion quality is a 10 out of 10...but for synch video longer than 40mins with a system less than 1.7ghz or higher...it might not be always possible.

(btw Swan was kind enough to point out that you can capture in 720x480 huffyuv in amcap if you do NOT touch the preview pin...it will capture fine but you wont see a picture. If you touch the preview pin or see any video what so ever while using it you will have to close it and reopen it. She suggested this with her own personal experience with amcap with another card...but sure enough it held true with the MSI. Also, on behalf of her request i tried Ulead Video Studio. Now it said it was capturing at 720x480...and it was. However it was really capturing, for some strange reason, a 320x240 image and just stretching it to 720x480. Also it introduced noise that i did not see in other apps. Again AmCap was the least noisiest of them all from what i test)

This card is a cartoon killer. Capturing cartoons with this card is down right great...awesome results. In fact looked better after capture than it did straight from satellite to the digital TV. Don't ask me why...it just did.

good luck to you all...i hope to see great results with the msi and leadtek (i might give one of those a shot in the future if reviews are good)

edit: o btw i got the card for 60usd...at that price it is worth a shot for even the heaviest skeptic i would believe.
edit again: my system stats that i OVERLY tested it in
--
1.33ghz
512 ddr
asus mobo
win2k sp3 (or sp2 at the time)
latest known drivers/support for all hardware
45gig 7200 rpm Maxtor (not sys disk)
source was satellite via 25ft s-video cable
framerate 29.976
huffyuve
720x480
--misc--
apps used: ~12
different systems used: ~20
best results 2ghz p4 with amcap (i pray for a update to that app)

[Eagle117]

My first system with the MSI card was on an Athlon XP 1700+ and I had noise. Now I'm on a 2.53 Ghz system and still have noise. Now, I'm not going to say that my cable in is perfect; in fact it is far from it. But my previous cards did not have near as much with these same sources. I have not used the s-video in, so I don't know how well that works, but what I need is scheduled TV records, since I work late and miss all my favorite shows. I am using the bundled software, but it is a million times better than PowerVCR II which I was using before. If I could get a better piece of software that would let me do easy scheduled records (ie. not VirtualVCR) I would give that a shot.

Overall, I'm interested in trying out some new cards and trying to get better results. Since I've been using the SmartSmoother in VirtualDub, I have been much happier with my results, but it takes a long time to do that.

[\AX]

yeh that tuner on the MSI is a piece for sure. I did give it a shot a few times...noise to he11 and black. Not too mention that the tuner itself in working condition is far from bug free. Some people have good results with it and others not so good.

yeh if you looking to use your coaxial tuner the msi card is not a wise decision at all.

The time i gave it a shot i was just doing it to see how it was more or less and that it worked. I ran into that same problem alot of people have on the last time i tried it and that is the tuner would jump spuratically from one channel to the next. The bundled software is what i used and it looked bad...real bad.

Also you say you might try 720x480...well i only liked the amcap but i need s-video and you need coaxial. But what you might try that i did was hunting down a "macro" type of app that controls keys...cant remember the name but it worked. I ran that to set the settings in amcap and used Windows Scheduler to launch amcap...it worked. However the stuff i was wanting to capture was a hour long and i would loose synch after 40min like i said before.

Again the noise your having is a mystery to me but since your using the tuner this should be true. Not using the tuner but the s-video/composite it would be a mystery. But then again some people get that noise somehow...dunno why though.

Have you thought about using s-video though? i dont mean neccesarily with this card but overall in general. What is the draw back of using it that makes you not use/try it?

[bobspliff]

Like Prom3theus, I have an AIW (9000 pro) and am considering ditching it for an MSI or a Leadtek for 2 reasons:

1. I've heard that AIW is overly-sensitive to poor quality VHS tapes, and all my old VHS cap's flicker constantly and are unwatchable (see my last post).

2. I can't seem to disable the again overly-sensitive Macrovision detection when using the latest drivers (I have tried all the patches out there).

Which card out of the Leadtek Winfast (not sure which model... TV 2000XP?) and the MSI TV@Anywhere would solve both these problems? I REALLY want a card that doesn't have Macrovision or on which it is easy to disable.

I'm not bothered about having a TV tuner, but MPEG2 hardware encoding would be nice.

Thanks,
Bob

[BruceL]

bobspliff

I saw your other post as well as this reply. I am not telling you what to do, but just conveying my recent experiences as I am new to capturing. I have an AIW Radeon and had Macrovision and noise problems. I tried the various techniques for disabling Macrovision but still encountered problems with what appeared to be the contrast getting brighter and dimmer periodically. I read about the Sima SCC and bought one. It removes the Macrovision, allows for quite a bit of adjustment (tint, color, sharpness [although I see no affect with sharpness], brightness, contrast, blue, green and red). Also has a bypass switch so you can evaluate the affect. It did a nice job removing the Macrovision but the picture was just not the quality I was looking for (I tend to be an obsessive compulsive perfectionist). I read about BT8X8 based capture products and saw the Leadtek Winfast TV2000XP Deluxe at NewEgg.com for $55US free shipping. For that kind of money I couldn't resist trying it. Now I'm just using the Leadtek with BTWinCap drivers, capturing with V-Dub Sync along with PICVideo MJPEG codec at 720X480 and am quite satisfied with the results. I tried Huffyuv but get too many dropped frames for my liking. I use the PICVideo MJPEG at a Quality setting of 19, but set the Luminance to 2 and Chrominance to 3. I still like the AIW for watching TV, but that's about it. As I gain experience I may want to look to do better, but for now I am quite pleased. Had I got the Leadtek first, I probably would have saved some money.

[prom3theus]

I don't anyone answered these from the posts, so I just wanted to be sure on something before I bought one of these to compare it to my ati AIW.

With the tv@anywhere and the Winfast tv2000, is it possible to capture into the fairly lossless (over rgb24) compressed avi formats like yuv, even huffy, without much trouble on a WDM system (directx 8+)? Like some others here, I really don't fool with mjpeg and such, and I don't know the settings. I don't even like huffy really. I can do it and prefer to capture directly into a VERY high bitrate hardware codec like yuv12 but these are pretty difficult to find now in WDM for some reason. In vfw I had no problems doing this in *any* capture app I tried (virtualdub, avi_io, etc). Now I have problems in win2000, and the AIWs dont' work properly now in directx7. I am even considering just setting up dualboot for win98/dx7 and using a card which still has vfw drivers like the AIW 128 I used to use!!

Please help. What card can I use cheaply and capture simply into "raw" video (1.2GB/minute) in WDM formats? I have a RAID array with about 150GB space to use, this isn't a problem for any 1-hour show. Can the leadtek do this?

Thanks.

[Owen]

prom3theus,
Why do you want to capture raw 25meg per second video when you can use HUFYUV and have about 8meg per second with the SAME quality.
HUFYUV is LOSSLESS you get back what you put in. Just like ZIP.
The MSI card can do this without problems.
As for the raw 25meg capture, I have not tried to do it. There is no reason to. I can think of no reason why it would not work.
Raw capture is easy for the system. Its just murder on the hard disk.
You can't use virtualdub or avi_io for capture with WDM systems.

If you have a DV camera that supports pass through (most good ones do)you can capture to DV format direct to disk.
I tried this today with my Panasonic MX8 and the quality is outstandingly good.
Better than the MSI or any other no pro capture card that I have used. And it only needs 2.5meg per second.

Regards,

Owen

[Zilla]

on another forum, people were recommending the Flyvideo 3000, yet here, it is hardly mention. I was just wondering why this was the case?

thanks

[prom3theus]

Sorry, I should be more specific. I don't like huffy but I will use it. For some reason it always seemed more 'grainy' than the original. But, anything which can capture in huffy can also capture in the raw input format to huffy, depending on system capabilities. So basically I meant to ask both.


So here's my breakdown so far, comparing the winfast tv 2000 deluxe with the ati all-in-wonder radeon 7500 (analog tuner):

Installing, both seemed good. The winfast installed flawlessly in windows 2000, and included some software for quicktime and windows encoder, which is a 'native' capture format for the PVR.

For programs, the winfast takes the lead for me. I never have liked the ATI MMC, but back in the days of the aiw 16MB card it was a good app. THe problem is that it has changed very very little since then. The PVR has a scheduler, a file splitter (something the MMC was still lacking after all that time), and it has many pre defined profiles which are great, and an easy interface to make your own. Basically, what the MMC spreads over several config pages, the PVR has in two pages, all together. The winfast comes with the windvd program, and I believe it is skinnable also, so that's pretty even with the MMC. The MMC file player and cd player I really never used, as they are pretty minimally functional compared to winamp, which actually is a better video player IMHO than the ATI MMC file player, which says a lot about ATI's software.

I will say though that the 'blended' desktop feature for ATI MMC tv player is just outstanding. It lets you make the tv window transparent at different gradations and keep it 'on top' so that you can see what's underneath. You can even have a full screen transparent tv window while you do things underneath. Unfortunately, neither the dvd player or the file player included this, which seems pretty odd. I'd love to have a playlist (which the file player doesn't support:) and have it transparent while I do other things. If the ati MMC did all of that in the MMC, I might say it's worth it for that. It's pretty sad when a video card maker's file player doesn't have saveable playlists. And, if you can't utilize the features of the card, like the transparency, since their programs don't utilize it well, and it doesn't transfer into third party apps, it's useless and you're paying for it.

For capture formats, the winfast takes a huge lead for me. There are formats which simply were not available for me in the radeon. Some people wouldn't care, but that selection was important for me. The winfast allowed recording to rgb24, yuy2, and a host of other 'raw' formats. This of course means more compressed formats. I just couldn't access a lot of what I wanted to in the radeon outside of the MMC.

If you already have a decent video card, I'd say keep that and add on the winfast. It seems comparable so far to the radeon aiw analog in terms of quality, and in my opinion superior in most other aspects I use. The only superior ATI feature I think is the transparent tv player window. If they extended that to include the file player and dvd windows, and made the file player actually worth using, then I'd say that would make the ATI better than my combo, in my opinion.