Need help/advice! Please!

[gurabli]

Hi!

I need a little help or to be more precise, an advice.
I would like to buy a TV-card, but not a very expensive, professional one.

I’m thinking about a Kworld TV878FBK. It is with a BT-878 chip, and as I read about it on the forum it is a quite good chip.

It says that can capture in MPEG-2 format as well.
It has an FM radio plus a remote control unit.

I would like to capture from my cable TV signal and after to archive all with XviD.

So my questions are:

1. Is this a card worth to be bought?
2. Can I capture at full PAL resolution with this card?
3. Has this card a Stereo audio capture, or how does it handle audio streams?
4. Will I have good picture quality compared to other cards at the same category?

Once more, I do not need a very expensive card.
Other option is for eg: Leadtek TV2000XP at almost same price.

Please give me some suggestions before I buy something, I don’t want to put a card in my PC and be so disappointed that I can throw it away.


Included software, as I know, is not so important, cause Virtual Dub mods are the best solution. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Thanx in forward!

Gurabli

[communist]

About the same problem - and about the same answer ;)
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=68031

[ppera2]

O: Never use exclamation in thread title! :) (That's very disgusting)

1: If you can't find something better

2: Yes, but it depends also from your machine and software - codec etc.

3: See specs. at their WEBsite, use google....

4: You may expect some noise at TV receive, but it depends from many factors - signal strength, MB, Power Supply etc.

5: Leadtek is better.

Virtual Dub VCR is really best capture tool for such cards. But... there is many complication about it, in first place incompability with WDM drivers.

[gurabli]

THX for your help.

OK, I won’t use any more exclamation in title.

KWorld and Leadtek have almost the same specifications, as I looked after. The only difference I found is that KWorld is only mono while Leadtek is stereo.
They both use the same BT chipset.

And about the noise:

ASUS Nforce145d
XP 1900+
512 MB RAM 266 MHZ

HDD WD 40 GB 7200rpm
HDD Maxtor 120 GB 8MB 7200rpm
Both IDE, UDMA-5 100
Creative LIVE 5.1
ATI Radeon 9500 128 MB

Not the highest config but it is quite good, I think, and it is more than enough for my needs.


- A question about IDE:

I have 2 HDDs and a DVD-rom and a CD writer.
I have the 2 HDDs on the first IDE channel and DVD and writer on the second.
Is this good, or should I change it like this:
Primary IDE: Maxtor 120 GB + DVD-Rom
Secondary IDE: WD 40 GB + CD-writer


Back to the TV cards, what would you recommend?
Which card? (one which works with VDub + acceptable quality + compatibility )
Please don’t write just the manufacturer, include the model!

THX,

Gurabli

[communist]

Under no circumstance change your current settings.
Since your HDDs are ATA 100 drives: If you connect them together with a CD-ROM / DVD-ROM you would slow them down very much coz those CD / DVD drives arent UDMA 100 - and the both devices would run at the lowest speed which is dictated by the slower drive (CD / DVD).

[ppera2]

Originally posted by gurabli
....They both use the same BT chipset....
- A question about IDE:...
Back to the TV cards, what would you recommend?
Which card? (one which works with VDub + acceptable quality + compatibility )...


Quality depends from many things - there is lot of cards with BT chipset, some are very good, some miserable.
Newer cards have now newer chips, which have less noise and slightly better picture, but still have problems with drivers and software. BT 8x8 has best software support still. But it will last no long.

Your machine is enough fast for full res. capturing. Of course some defragment is welcome...

I have same disk configuration, and it works very well. Always capture on second HD.

I can't really recommend card, I tested only few.

All cards will work with V Dub, but not how you expect. Problem is that V Dub is old programm, and it uses old VFW capture driver system, while Win XP works with WDM system. Most of newer cards simple doesn't have VFW drivers, only WDM, for Win 98 SE too.

V Dub yet will work with WDM drivers, because Microsoft made so called wrapper or mapper, which 'translates' WDM to VFW. But it is little slow, and therefore has limited vertical resolution to 288 lines (this is by me a bit stupid, because limit stays even by low horizontal res. too). So, you can't capture above 288 vert. lines with V Dub and it's mod's with 99% drivers. All this is reason for frequent posts about bad drivers, V Dub limitations etc.

There is a couple solution: installing BTWincap drivers. I had lot of troubles with installation, and with settings of color, bright. etc. with that driver. Plus, it will disallow usage of original card's drivers, and capture programs too. With some luck, you will get good full res. capture with it.

Other way is usage of VFW drivers in Win 98 SE. I installed some generic VFW BT 8x8 drivers in Win 98 SE, and it works very well with V Dub, actually better than BTWincap (it still needs wrapper, because is WDM, just they hacked vertical limit).

Third way is to use some other capture program instead V Dub. Virtual VCR is very good, free, but limited with filters, options in compare with V Dub.
Some cards supplie good capturing software - Pinnacle for example, but it must not work well on every config.

Eh, maybe finding best software is harder than finding best card?