Looking for some suggestions...

[arwenjade]

I've been reading the board for awhile, so I hope ya'll can help. (I'm also gonna try not to step on any toes.)

I'm looking to buy a video capture device, but not sure which way to go. :confused: I've done some homework and it seems *most* people think internal capture cards are better. My problem is that all my PCI slots are in use atm.

So I looked at external devices. Is it just me? 'Cuz it seems like they're all either 1) fairly decent and really expensive or 2)dirt cheap and crap.

What I need is some help in sorting out PCI, TV tuner, PVR, DVR etc. I do NOT want someone to tell me what to buy! Just some suggestions in what is known to work with my system. I can make my own decision from there.:)

What I want to do:
Mainly, Capture VHS to DVD

My system setup:
P4, 512MB SDDR2, 80GB HD + 250GB extra HD, ATI
Radeon X300, WinXP Pro

Thanks in advance!

PS I can spend about $200 USD.

PPS Sorry this is kinda long!

[arwenjade]

Some more specific questions related to my first post:

1) What's the difference between DVR and PVR?

2) Is a PCI graphics card with video capture the same as a TV tuner?

3) I have a TV with cable and satellite, what would be the benefits of a TV tuner for me?

4) Do those little palm-sized video capture devices work as well as the boxes? (This answer seems to be 'no' according to user responses?)

5) On devices with hardware encoding, can you use a video editor first or does it go straight from the source to a DVD?

After thinking about my first post I realized I probably didn't make myself very clear. So maybe these ?? will help. :confused:

Thanks...

[DonQ]

2) Is a PCI graphics card with video capture the same as a TV tuner?

No. TV tuners are mainly for receving/capturing TV broadcast, many of these allow capture analog signals (composite, SVideo) too. There are capture cards, having no tuner included; so allow some graphics cards (ATI VIVO models) video capture.

3) I have a TV with cable and satellite, what would be the benefits of a TV tuner for me?

Depends. If you buy TV tuner card, able to receive cable channels (and decode them, if they are digital and encrypted), then you can watch and capture one more channel at a time. For satellite I think no benefits.

4) Do those little palm-sized video capture devices work as well as the boxes? (This answer seems to be 'no' according to user responses?)

Those little external TV tuners give usually crappy picture. I don't know about pure external capture cards, but considering that USB bus doesn't allow throughput of entire video frequency band, those devices need to compress video into some form of MPEG and you lose possibility to edit/filter lossless video. Should not be big problem with VHS source though.

5) On devices with hardware encoding, can you use a video editor first or does it go straight from the source to a DVD?

Hardware encoding cards output/save MPEG2 stream/file; you can edit this file like any other MPEG file. For older computers (P4 below 1.5-2GHz) hardware mpeg encoding is essential, if you want capture directly to mpeg2. On faster computers you can capture mpeg2 (or Xvid) in realtime.

With hardware encoder you may lose possibility to capture uncompressed (or almost lossless compressed - HuffYUV, MJPeg) video (depend on card model). Well, such capture is recommended only if you want do some serious video processing; I think for VHS source you don't need that.
--
I think I would look for some USB capture device (without tuner), having hardware mpeg encoder (if there are any such devices at all, at least for reasonable price).

[FishTank]

i got a pinnacle pctv usb card. it has a tuner, but its really crappy.
what i do is i use the composite to my vcr, so i can capture tv
over the vcr tuner or vhs tapes.

i use vdub to capture as either mjpeg, huffyuv or xvid with pcm audio. works for me :)

[jult]

i got a pinnacle pctv usb card. it has a tuner, but its really crappy.
what i do is i use the composite to my vcr, so i can capture tv
over the vcr tuner or vhs tapes.

i use vdub to capture as either mjpeg, huffyuv or xvid with pcm audio. works for me :)
You mean you put the composite RCA into the Pinnacle USB card, and then it can be captured using vdub? How about the audio? Is that also on this Pinnacle card, or do you use your audio-card ins for that?

Are Pinnacle drivers any good/stable? If you like to have the best chip for such conversions, which ones are the best nowadays?

And why is Canopus only using firewire, are they nuts?

[FishTank]

yep (vcr to tvcard via composite, also audio via jack)
just make sure your vcr HAS video/audio output composite!
not all do and if you have a SVHS, then you could use that one.

you could use the soundcard for audio, but i use the pctv card one.

are the pinnacle drivers stable?
well let me put it this way, the software from pinnacle (pinnacle media center v4) is utter crap :lol:
i installed that but never use it. i use vdub and i NEVER had a
crash or a bad capture and ive captured about 200+ movies
from paytv :D
its a cheap box! lol (remote never worked too, but i dont need it anyway)

canopis uses firewire because thats still the "pro" way to go i spose.
adobe premiere can only capture via firewire for example. i cant
use that to capture, but i dont want to. i love vdub and i can
capture in resolutions of 720x576 with MJPEG (ffdshow) or
huffyuv or xvid allthough xvid only with a resolution of 352x288
as my cpu isnt THAT fast (p4d 3gig).

hope this helps :)

[arwenjade]

Is capturing via firewire better than usb? Is Canopis the only ones to make capture devices for firewire? They're kind of expensive I think.

I don't have Adobe Premiere, but I do have firewire. If I can capture with some other program that I already have with firewire that'd be good if it improves the quality.

Even though I just want to capture VHS, I want as good a quality as I can get because I intend to mass produce the final DVD as Christmas gifts for my family.

*sigh* Maybe I should just upgrade my graphics card.:(

[FishTank]

only firewire 800 is faster then usb2.0!
so if your pc doesnt have a FW800 controller or the capture card
isnt FW800, then usb2.0 is actually better.

imho, if you need that great a quality, then take the vhs and
go to a shop and let the pros do it (if its a one time thingy).
then copy the dvds yourself. would prolly be a whole lot cheaper
in the end too if you take time wasted into account as well as
the purchase of a capture card.

edit: oh and i know a guy who has a canopis and it cost like 400 US dollars.
IIRC he got adobe premiere with it and if i think about the price AP costs
then i know why the canopis are so expensive :D
i dont know if you can use vdub to capture via firewire, but i doubt it.
with adobe premiere you capture as DV which would not be my first
choice by a long shot.
my02

[arwenjade]

FishTank,

Thanks for your help!

Well, I don't know if my FW is 800, so I'm guessing its not. I do have usb 2.0 though. I don't know of any shops in my area that convert VHS to DVD, guess I could check the yellow pages. Anyway I want to convert all our home videos to DVD, its just this one I want to give as gifts.

I only have about $200 so the Canopis is out anyway. I thought if some other product offered FW transfer I might consider it. If its not going to help me or make the quality better then I won't worry about it. I just want to get as much out of my measly $200 as I can.

Also, I'm not to worried about how much time it takes (I have 'til Christmas!) and its all a learning process for me. I love learning new things and video editing is fun!:D

Thanks,
aj

PS Thank you to DonQ too!

[DonQ]

Well, sorry, I was bit wrong about USB bandwidth.

With good drivers and no other USB activity you can capture lossless video (about 20MB/s, using YUV colorspace) over USB2.0 (real maximum speed about 40MB/s). Virtualdub with HuffYUV encoder takes no much CPU (30% for AthlonXP 2800+, 10-20% form AMD64 3500+ for me, using PCI TV tuner card; disk space usage about 30MB/hour). XViD on low settings makes 60% CPU on AMD64, disk space about 10MB/hour, enough quality for broadcast TV recording (PAL, but NTSC should about same).

I found next page, maybe you can get some startup info: http://www.videoguys.com/vidcap.htm :)

[jult]

So, which one gives better quality video-caps;
http://www.adstech.com/products/USBAV-711-EF/intro/usbav711intro.asp?pid=USBAV-711-EF
or one of these:
http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/compare/compare_pvr.html
?

I only need DV, VHS, Hi8/SVHS capturing to harddisk,
no immediate burning stuff. Knowing myself
I will always be doing post-processing (and editing), so I'd prefer
uncompressed capture options.
Are the two brands I mentioned supported with VirtualDub ?

[DrP]

The Hauppauge 150/500 and USB PVRs on that page are really only intended to be used as MPEG/2 capture devices. While it is possible to use programs such as virtualdub to do frame capture its not particularly easy to do (I think the colour format returned from the hardware is YV09 or something odd like that). Also audio has to be captured via a sound card when doing that so the issues of audio sync pop up again.

Having said that the PVR150 can produce reasonable results. Look at these files (http://www.users.on.net/~alfalfa/mpg).

clip.mpg was produced by recording an old ep of Alias with a PVR150 at 15Mbit/sec and then recompressing (CCE or HCENC) to 3.3Mbit/sec average (actual clipping is 2.5Mbit/sec av). Source was via s-video from the output of a fairly crappy pay TV box.

The other two files are the direct output of the card at different rates as specified in the file names.

[DonQ]

Looking at spec and searcing google seems that Adstech device is hardware mpeg2 device, needs their propieritary software for capturing and cannot be used with any other capture program (including Virtualdub) :( Otherwise good solution (excluding driver bugs of course).

Hauppauge non-USB PVR cards are hardware mpeg2, they not usable with Virtualdub (they have no analog audio output and their digital audio is not accessible to Virtualdub).
USB versions seem have analog audio output and thereby it could be possible to use Virtualdub with them. Well, I've no first person experience, neither did I found any reliable information on the net (yet).

And one more link to make things messier :)
videohelp.com USB2.0 cards, page 2 (http://www.videohelp.com/capturecards?CaptureCard=&searchconnection=USB2&price=&hits=50&Submit=Search&Search=Search&&next=50&orderby=Price#next)

[jult]

Adstech device is hardware mpeg2 device, needs their propieritary software for capturing and cannot be used with any other capture program (including Virtualdub) :( Otherwise good solution (excluding driver bugs of course).

Hauppauge non-USB PVR cards are hardware mpeg2, they not usable with Virtualdub (they have no analog audio output and their digital audio is not accessible to Virtualdub).
USB versions seem have analog audio output and thereby it could be possible to use Virtualdub with them. Well, I've no first person experience, neither did I found any reliable information on the net (yet).

And one more link to make things messier :)
videohelp.com USB2.0 cards, page 2 (http://www.videohelp.com/capturecards?CaptureCard=&searchconnection=USB2&price=&hits=50&Submit=Search&Search=Search&&next=50&orderby=Price#next)
Well, I really need one that VirtualDub can translate the signal from. And I don't have firewire. I really wonder what options are left. Should one really get the terribly expensive matrox units for something as trivial as converting VHS/Hi8 to digital?

I also found out ADS does not offer Windows XP x64 drivers. That's just VERY silly.
Also the fact that Canopus stopped selling PCI cards is just VERY stupid.
Why are they all so crazy about USB and firewire? I just need a good damn internal card.

What I'm also VERY surprised about is that none of those units ship with Euroscart connectivity for VHS etc.
The point of SCART was that you'd have R-G-B fed separately, instead of in one composite coax. All VHS recorders I own offer the scart rgb-output. Yet these capture 'solutions' all only offer a Composite and s-video in? Why are they all so stupid???
When looking for a decent capture card, all I find are bad reviews, bad drivers, missing driver support for very common operating systems, old (very old) codecs (we are at x264 and Ogg Vorbis now, get with it, it's freaking open source, how hard can it be to use it for your hardware?!), or discontinued products. Almost 80% of the ones on videohelp are 'no longer supported'.

It almost makes me think I need to start and build my own hardware for this. Crazy!
They are totally missing out on the pro-sumer market.

[DonQ]

-- offtopic --

I went through similar nightmare, looking for suitable TV tuner PCI card. Well, x64 support was not needed; other requirements were PAL, NICAM and VirtualDub (or ability to capture with some other software, using HuffYUV). Oh, and one more - I wanted test different cards before buying; the latest limited my choiche to some only few cards, which were available at one local PC shop.

I had ATI AIW - good image, but driver problems, poor NICAM support and some PAL color problems made it no-go. At least I could use it with VirtualDub :)

One Conexant chipset based Avermedia card with hardware mpeg2 encoder had much worse picture than ATI AIW (not only colors, but overall imege was somehow smudged) and VirtualDub had problems with it too. Well, I didn't search for better driver anyway - image quality was bad.

Finally I find AverTV Studio 503. Exact maker and model are IMHO not important, but I concluded that next things are:

Philips MK5 analog tuner
Philips SAA7135 TV decoder

Avermedia propieritary drivers were absolute crap, even Avermedia TV application could not capture without problems, VirtualDub didn't work at all.
I made it work with old Philips reference drivers; found these from one russian site. No problems with VirtualDub so far :)

-- somewhat back to topic --

Why I posted my TV tuner story - maybe you just should go to the easiest route and buy some cheap TV tuner card. I can't say that Philips SAA713x chip is best for you, maybe some ATI chip would be better (especially if you're using NTSC or just capturing SVideo). I didn't like conexant chipset based card image - conexant may have 10bit ADC, but image (colors) looked worse than Philips ones (9bit). ATI AIW image was almost best, but other problems made me to avoid it either. Reading reviews, ATI 550 image is best of all consumer TV cards - but I have no experience using that card (and it likely has similar problems than older AIW).

If you'll be using SVideo, then you even do not need 3D comb filtering in hardware (Philips SAA7135 has that, can't say about other chips). For TV and composite signal 3D comb filter is crucial.

And you don't need good (analog) TV tuner on card - because you won't capture TV anyway :)

What about SCART - I've yet to see capture cards with SCART support. IMHO SVideo is enough good - it carries full chroma and luma signals and actually these are much closer to native recorded signal than RGB.

[jult]

I decided on a Canopus anyway, and ordered their ADVC55. Also added a firewire io pci-card, so that solves the problem not having any.

Yes, I already soldered a SCART to S-video cable for this.

By the way, a friend of mine is considering buying a
Pioneer DVR-RT602 HS
which is this DVD HDD VHS/VCR combination (http://www.pioneer.nl/nl/products/45/133/501/DVR-RT602H-S/index.html) and seems to give amazing results, since it has a TBC built-in, and outputs the VHS to HDD content digitally as well as via s-video or scart. Plus you have the advantage you can edit content straight from a remote control. Plus burn it on DVD when ready.
Looking into this machine it almost made me doubt my decision on the Canopus, actually. What do you guys think about machines like that?

[FishTank]

I decided on a Canopus anyway, and ordered their ADVC55. Also added a firewire io pci-card, so that solves the problem not having any.

Yes, I already soldered a SCART to S-video cable for this.

By the way, a friend of mine is considering buying a
Pioneer DVR-RT602 HS
which is this DVD HDD VHS/VCR combination (http://www.pioneer.nl/nl/products/42/125/501/DVR-RT602H-S/) and seems to give amazing results, since it has a TBC built-in, and outputs the VHS to HDD content digitally as well as via s-video or scart. Plus you have the advantage you can edit content straight from a remote control. Plus burn it on DVD when ready.
Looking into this machine it almost made me doubt my decision on the Canopus, actually. What do you guys think about machines like that?

i thought you wanted to use vdub? well good luck with that and
the canopis.
oh and yer link aint working ;)

[jult]

i thought you wanted to use vdub? well good luck with that and
the canopus.
What do you mean, doesn't vdub support a dv input from firewire?
And I only use vdub to filter, crop, convert, compress and such. I see no problem with that on any vhs-captured file. Not even when it's from a Pioneer HDD/VCR (link working again).

[FishTank]

post process wont be a problem of course, but if you wanted to
capture in vdub, so you can capture with any codec you want, then
you probably run into problems. i never had the chance to test it
myself but the friend of mine (who lives far away) who has a canopus couldnt get vdub
to recognize it.
he had to capture in adobe premiere..

good luck!

[jult]

Ah, yes, I found some info on it via google. I think I'll be fine doing the capturing with Vegas.

I also changed my order, because I really needed some more control and TBC for my old VHS and Hi8 tapes. So I'm now getting this amazing unit (http://canopus.com/products/ADVC300/). A little over my intended budget, but hey, it's a good investment. Not hard to sell it when I'm done either.

[FishTank]

all good then :D
thats a nifty box. im sure you'll be happy with it :)

[DonQ]

Wow, looks amazing. If your budget permits, then good buy :)

[jult]

Just wanted to let you know, I can capture with VirtualDub using the firewire source (being the Canopus ADVC300)!
It outputs DV. Under the Device menu in VDub, I selected:

1 Microsoft DV Camera and VCR (DirectShow)

and it also captures audio from the firewire signal just fine!
Here's what GSpot tells me about the first capture I did using VDub:
http://jult.nl/compstuff/printscreens/virtualdub_canopus.html

Now I wonder, what type of codec is "dvsd" ? DV standard, I guess?
I see no problems with converting this avi to other formats. And is this the best format I can capture the firewire output in using VirtualDub?

I did see about 28 frames being dropped (in total) for this 6 and a half minute capture, but then, the source is an old VHS tape (using s-video YC connection) so that might be it. Overall I'm quite happy with the (first) results. At first I used Vegas to capture with, but this seems easier (uses less CPU too).

The OS used here is Windows XP x64 edition (2003 base), and I have a lot of codecs installed on it, plus the Picture Controller 300 version 1.00.003 from Canopus but I'm not sure if it installed drivers or had any influence here, since I did not have it running during or before the capture.

[jggimi]

jult:

DV has its own forum here. In brief: DV is a compressed digital video format. It is not very heavily compressed, and unlike MPEG, each frame is independent, simplifying editing. DV "capture" is a bit-for-bit digital copy from the camcorder. DV "capture" is usually to the AVI container, and most DV capture programs allow a choice of Type-1 or Type-2 AVI. Please see the sticky threads in the DV forum for much more information. And this link may also help:

http://forum.doom9.org/announcement.php?f=10