PVR-250 or alternatives (for VHS to DVD)

[sej7278]

I want to convert some VHS tapes and some live TV to DVD and would like a hardware MPEG2 encoder. The live TV would be fed through my VCR, so I don't really need a TV tuner, just SVHS-in.

I was looking at the USB2 solutions like the ConvertX, but can't find any real info about it.

Soooo, I'm looking for alternatives now, people have suggested the WinTV PVR350, but as I don't need video out and FM tuner, I guess I could save $50 and get a 250. Has anyone tried the USB2 version of that, or should I stick with the vanilla PCI?

Are there any other suggestions, I really want to spend no more than about $170 and will probably not be doing much editting (just cropping) so no AVI capture is not a huge issue, as most of my stuff with just be MPEG2.

I do not want an ATI AiW card - had that crap before.

People have also said to buy a digital camcorder with analog passthru and firewire card and then recode the DV to MPEG2, but that's going to tax my 1.6GHz PC too much I expect.

What software do you recommend - I've heard the stuff bundled with the WinTV's is trash. I have TMPEGEnc+ and Premiere 6 (running on WinXP Pro SP1).

[diehardii]

Hardware encoding with MPEG2 is definitely the way to go. USB mpeg2 solutions will limit the bitrate you can capture video at, so PCI is the superior way to go. I feel like a shill here, because I just mentioned it in a previous post, but the TV Plugin from myHTPC is supposedly excellent with the PVR250.
It has

hardware deinterlacing /dscaler deinterlacing
schedulable recording via program guide
timeshifting (XP SP1)
and various other goodies. Its like sagerecorder only free.

Good luck.

~Steve

[sej7278]

I've actually gone with the PVR-250 instead of the ConvertX and must say I'm very pleased.

The WinTV2000 software is kinda crappy, but the capture quality and even the basic scheduler is good.

I was very disappointed with the SVCD capture, but DVD quality or even Half D1 is much better - the SVCD was at just too low a bitrate.

[MarsOfOld]

I use Instant DVD 2 (external hardware usb mpeg1/2 encoder) to capture to DVD-compatible video and have found no significant problems. About $185. It will also do VCD capture if you don't have a DVD burner. Only possible issue is that it has realistic hardware requirements of a 1.6 Pentium4 CPU, 512Mb RAM, and a big fast hard drive.(I have a 3GhzP4, 1 Gbyte RAM, and 2 raided WD-JB hard drives). I recommend it...