ADVC-50, ADVC-100 analog to digital converters

[george7523]

Hi everyone,
I plan on buying a canopus advc-50/advc-100 digital to analog converter hearing some good reviews about it on some other forum. I get the feeling that that forum isn't as authortative as this one, so I was wondering if anyone here having experience with this hardware can comment on its quality ? my purpose with the advc-50 is to digitize some vhs only foreign movies and encode them with cce and onto dvd-r.

thanks,

George

[^^-+I4004+-^^]

it's mentioned in "tested capture cards"
some problems with vhs:TBC resolves them.....
(2x price)
(also _as i remember_same issue mentioned somewhere
in vcdhelp forums,but not sure...)

[ScrollLock]

I won't be much of a help since I don't own a VCR and bought the ADVC-100 only yesterday.

I (intend to) use the ADVC-100 to record from analog cable-TV (I am so unsatisfied with quality of the BT878-based cards...).
My first impression is very positive. The device installation was plug-and-play (Windows 2000) as one would expect and the simple DVIO freeware software that I found on the web captures perfectly. The captured image quality is way, way better than what I have been able to achieve with Hauppauge WinTV and Leadtek WinFast 2000 XP BT878 cards. I also tried Scenalyser, which also works great.

Due to the short time of ownership I haven't yet used it a lot, so take what I wrote with a pinch of salt. BTW, I am in a PAL country.

hope it helps, ScrollLock

[thorazine]

Thanks for your comments ScrollLock, I'm also interested in purchasing an ADVC+firewire to replace my BT878.

How about A/V sync? Canopus advertises *perfect* A/V sync over long periods of time, is that true?

[ScrollLock]

Originally posted by thorazine
How about A/V sync? Canopus advertises *perfect* A/V sync over long periods of time, is that true?

I have the feature turned on at the moment. I recorded a one hour show yesterday (=13 GB AVI file, captured using DVIO) and it worked very well, no sync problem at all. But I have not yet done the opposite, capturing with the perfect sync feature off.
The manual mentions that one should switch the feature off when capturing from a poor source (=VHS machine) and audio drops out every once in a while. No drop outs with my cable-TV source.

I have encountered though that on scrolling tickers like Channel Newsasia or CNBC here in Singapore the scrolling text is of unregular speed. Barely noticable, but it's there. I have no idea whether this is a side-effect of the perfect sync or whether this is something totally not related to the ADVC-100 like my playback system having jitter (which is more likely). I will test it when I find the time.

The capture quality is way above what BT878 cards can achieve (though I have never seen the famous IDS Falcon). But then, for 5 times the price, this is what one expects ;)

cheers, ScrollLock

[Crucio]

what format does this record to? uncompressed? or is it something like minidv?

[ScrollLock]

Originally posted by Crucio
what format does this record to? uncompressed? or is it something like minidv?

The Canopus ADVC-100 uses the same format as DV camcorders, the DV format. DV is a lossy intraframe compression, achieving 5:1 compression ratio, which results in a bitstream of 36 Mbps (incl. audio). For more info have a look at
http://www.dvformat.com/htm/features/2000/8_00/dv_format_faq.htm

The ADVC-100 takes analog video in (Composite or S-Video), digitizes it, converts it to DV (in hardware) and sends it to the computer via IEEE-1394 (FireWire, iLink). As the computer receives already a compressed data stream, the CPU requirements for recording DV are relatively low. Just make sure you have enough HDD space (approx 13 GB per hour).

ScrollLock

[Crucio]

i havent been too impressed with dv in the past, but maybe this is better

[ScrollLock]

@Crucio


i havent been too impressed with dv in the past, but maybe this is better
Quality comments are very subjective, of course.
Just being curious: is there any (affordable) video capturing technology that you'd recommend?


@thorazine

This morning I tested the audio sync issue. I have switched the hardware audio sync support off to test whether anything goes out of sync. I have recorded 2:40:00, which resulted in a 32 GB AVI file. (After that no more HDD space. Need to clean up a bit :) ). No problem with the audio sync (note: the "perfect sync" feature was off; source was cable-TV via Composite).

I captured using DVIO, which is great for my purpose. No dropped frames at all and the CPU usage always stays below 5% on an AMD 1800XP. I use Windows 2000, NTFS file system.

I also cross-checked my comment about the scrolling ticker smoothness and am happy to report that this was just my playback machine, not the "perfect sync" feature. I was encoding a video while playing the file, which caused the jitter. The recorded files are smooth and play great without the encoding in the background. Needless to say, I am a happy camper :D

happy capturing, ScrollLock

[theReal]

i havent been too impressed with dv in the past, but maybe this is better

Probably depends on the DV encoder. If the quality of the canopus capture chips are comparable to that of a Sony PC100E, I think it's definitely worth it. Unfortunately the Sony camcorder cannot pass through DV, it will only record to tape - but the quality is so much better than with a BT chip. From a good analog tv source, I can't see a difference to the original tv picture (and that's as good as it needs to be for my taste :))