Which card to buy for capturing?

[ChAoS Overlord]

Which card should I buy for captures? A Hauppage WinTV card (which one)? A Pinnacle Rave Pro? A Terratec?

Which cards give nice quality + work with most programs?

[Ookami]

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=20344

For the n-th time, quality is relative! What are you willing to pay? What do you want (VCDs,SVCDs,Divx etc. at high res, Divx etc. at low res...)?

And so on...

[Koepi]

It's all in the FAQ.

And - in several threads here.

(thjx ookami for replying first :) )

[ChAoS Overlord]

Thx, it's really for divx encodes, preferably high quality... Doesn't anybody have any clear insights on those terratecs or pctv? I don't see any in the faq and the links posted there.

[avih]

since you don't need a studio quality card, i'd suggest to go for the cheapest. most of the cards use the same chipsets anyway.

i'd suggest choosing a card with bt8xx (aka connexant) chipset and a philips tuner, as these are the most common afaik, and will have less problems with generic applications than cards than use 'exotic' chipsets or tuners.

cheers
avi

[Ookami]

> most of the cards use the same chipsets anyway.

That is correct, but the implementation is important too. So if you have two cards with the chipset x and card A has good drivers, card B bad? There are many other issues, so it's, sadly, not so easy to say: "everything with the BT chipset has the same quality".

@ChAoS Overlord

Make some search and read a bit, we have discussed this to death. I have only linked two threads but there are many more.

Maybe we can get some input from BT users?

@Avih

What card do you use? Maybe you could recommend yours?

Cheers,

Ookie.

[Koepi]

Avermedia TVPhone 98 w/VCR (well, the VCR part isn't important) together with the latest btwincap drivers is doing an incredible good job for incredible low money.

Though I'd say the new philips chipset should have some advantages like higher bit depth (9bit) and some very nice features... but I haven't seen this card in action and I can't tell about the drivers so this would be a big experiment - the philips option is more or less theoretical then.

Stick with well known, well supported cards with bt878a chips and a good sound processor for the stereo sound, use btwincap drivers, use a real OS like win2k (I can't recommand win9x or winXP even if some guides tell so), and you're on the safe, mid-high quality side.

BUT read the guides from luke and hawk and keep an eye on compression with HUFFYUV and MJPEG as well as the usual stuff as good drivers for your VGA/IDE chipset and so on.

(Just a small summery of those threads. Read them!)

Regards,
Koepi

[avih]

Ookami,
i have an old (from about 1998) fastcom card. it's bt878, phillips tuner with fm support.

it gives me desscent quality (more than i need), and working nicely. on win98 the original drivers were excellent, but on xp, their drivers sucks. and most general apps don't know this cards settings.

i won't recomment it for this reason.

but i do enjoy it :)

cheers
avi