Terratec Cinergy 400 vs Pinnacle PCTV pro?

[romeo]

i know this is the n'th post about such question, but, i want your opinions:

I want to convert some home video's to DVD, and i learned that i need a capture card.

i searched the local market (Italy), and i found mostly Terratec and pinnacle, and i found these 2 models that seems good, and 1 a bit expensive:
1- Terratec Cinergy 400.
2- Pinnacle PCTV Pro edition 5.
3- Hauppauge PVR 250.

i looked for review about these products, i couldn't find.
which is better? they are both software compression, but as of what i read on this site (http://www.aardvark.co.nz/pvr/pvr7.shtml) software compression have some pro's not in hardware compression (raw AVI for ex is not available in hardware compression.

i read on the website of the computer shop i want to buy from, that terratec is more stable, and software is better than pinnacle, is this true?

i have an Athlon 1333, 384MB ram, can such a computer capture mpeg2 in real time to convert later to dvd? or copy into some light compression (huffyuv/mjpeg) then convert to mpeg2?

[romeo]

anybody here have terratec cinergy 200/400/600? are they good? do they capture at 700x500 things? or only 300x200?

[Arachnotron]

which is better? Forum rule 12... ;)

Anyhow, I have a Cinergy 400.
The main point for a capcard is which chip it uses. The Terratec 400/600 uses a Philips SAA7134 chip, and can cap up to 720xxxx or 1200xxxx depending on the driver. Higher than 720 it pointless by the way. The Terratec 200 uses the SAA7130. The main difference is stereo sound for watching TV I think.

The Pinnacle uses a conexant BT878. (or fusion 878)

There have been numerous posts about comparisons between the two chips. The BT878 is reputed to give a bit more sharper image, the Philips a more clean one. Which you prefer is more a matter of taste than anything else. I bought mine mainly because I needed PAL-60 support (American tapes played back on a PAL VCR) which is not available on most cards. If you search for the chip names instead of the card names you probably will find much more info on this forum.

The PVR has hardware MPG-2 compression. For more info on that, look on this site: http://www.cask-of-amontillado.com/htpc.html
About the pro's an con's of hardware mpeg-2 compression there have been many discussion in this forum too. Personally, I don't like it but other people over here love it. Once again, a matter of taste and for what purpose you want to use it.

Also look over the capture guide. There are a lot of testpics in there, and some were made with a Cinergy.

Which one comes with the better software? No idea. I never use the included software anyway. You will find that most people over here cap with virtualdub, virtualVCR or iuVCR and process in vdub or avisynth. Again, not neccesarily because that is better (though it often is ;) ) but because they like the features. Software that comes with cards often won't let you tweak everything, but can give you satisfactory results. So again, it depends on what you want. If you are happy with it, use it.

In my experience, Hauppauge tends to come with little software for video processing, while pinnacle does. Terratec comes with Intervideo software, which is mostly focussed on recording, not processing. But I'm not sure what is included nowadays with all those cards.