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TV capture cards

J

jnex26

2[H]4U
Joined
Aug 7, 2001
Messages
3,353
OK I have quite a few VHS Home movies that i want to encode to DVD (I have a DVD writer) but i need the best possible DVD capture card I can get for around £100

Now I'm a UK resident and all my vids are PAL so it needs to be pal compatible. I do beleive i have a machine sutable to do the capturing without frame loss but i would like to use hardware MPEG2 encoding if possible.

My machine specs are

XP2400 (266 FSB) Cooled with Zalman Flower cooler
Epox K8HA+ Mainboard
1 Gig Ram PC2700 Ram at 2100 with Turbo Mem timings
9600 Pro (AGP 4x's)
Soundblaster Live Platinum Edition - Front pannel connected
Netgear FA311 10/100 Network card (Connected to internet Via Smoothwall firewall and 8 port 10/100 switch)
Promise Tx2 Controller card
5 Hard drives (TX2 Has 3 drives, Onboard IDE has 2 (Pri and Sla devices on one channel)
NEC2500A DVD writer (8x Speed -/+ compatible connected to MB Secondary IDE channel as Singular device aka Master)
Via USB 2.0 Controller card (Connected to USB2.0 Hardrive + Psion wavefinder)
6x USB 1.0 (Onboard) Connected to Logic 3 KVM (W MX700(USB)/PS2 Microsoft keyboard)
Lian-Li PC 61 Case
550 Watt PSU. (Forgotten the make)
Win XP Pro SP1 (All updates Installed)

That's about the complete specifications for the entire machine.

Thanks

Jnex

edit:\\ As for why the detailed machine specs, that would be because I have seen so many post asking for more information
 
If I were doing what you were doing, I would probably use my DV video camera to transfer the video to the computer. It has video inputs, and it has very good picture quality. With that there are no worries of missed frames or bad compression, etc. I would rather use that than by TV tuner card.

But if you don't have such a convinient camera, then look for something else.
 
Originally posted by ilkka
If I were doing what you were doing, I would probably use my DV video camera to transfer the video to the computer. It has video inputs, and it has very good picture quality. With that there are no worries of missed frames or bad compression, etc. I would rather use that than by TV tuner card.

But if you don't have such a convinient camera, then look for something else.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion. But that's not exactly what i was looking for.

I don't even want a TV tuner card all I want is a pure capture card. I've seen a few USB capture cards but even with USB 2.0 won't that be a bit risky due to the possiblity of dropped frames.
 
Originally posted by jnex26
Thanks for the suggestion. But that's not exactly what i was looking for.

I don't even want a TV tuner card all I want is a pure capture card. I've seen a few USB capture cards but even with USB 2.0 won't that be a bit risky due to the possiblity of dropped frames.
Click to expand...
i would go with pci capture for the following reasons, even though they may be unfounded. i'll explain.

pci = 33mhz X 32bit bandwidth = 1056 kilobits / second. divided by 8 bits = 132 kilobytes per second as theoretical max throughput.

usb2.0 = 480 kilobits per second (bus specifications), divided by 8 bits = 60 kilobytes per second as theoretical max throughput.

usb2.0 is also routed through the pci bus from what i've read, so it coupled with the fact that it has less theoretical maximum throughput, usb2.0 has additional hardware latencies to calculate into the equation, which can obviously only make it slower.

i suppose the resolution, framerate and color depth of the video you are capturing are the determining factors in this equation, and i do not know what the corresponding throughput would be required to capture a video at a particular resolution, color depth, etc... but i'm sure such an equation exists. i do not konw if the throughput of usb2.0 bus is enough to handle the requirements for a given video of given size, color depth, fps. usb2.0 might be more than enough, i dont know. but my gut instinct would be to go with the higher throughput solution, which would be pci: it has 2x the theoretical max throughput as does usb2.0, period.

dazzle was bought by pinnacle, and i understand that the new pinnacle studio version 8 software comes bundled with the pinnacle capture cards. someone else i know uses a pci capture card from pinnacle and highly reccomends it and its software as he says its very easy to use - his parents capture home videos and tv shows and such using this setup :eek:
 
Well I think i've chosen. I would have prefered one with a TV Tuner so i can use it a PVR but oh well.

AS for going USB after some investigation It turns out that PCI cards can suffer interferance from teh processor and other cads local to it ( even tho it's sheilded) and PCI cards are also lazy and the MPEG 2 encoding is done by the processor where as all USB ones seem to be intergrated and have hardware encoding.

Just one more question is there a version of this device that has a TV Tuner I don't need the video out All i need is the S-Vid/ Stereo Input and Composite inputs. A TV tuner would be nice tho.


http://www.pinnaclesys.com/docloade...uct_ID=1885&Langue_ID=2&loc=spec&division_id=
 
if your capture card captures at 32 bit color depth, at standard tv resolution 480x480, that means theres 480 times 480 pixels during a single frame, which is a total of 230400 pixels. 32 bit depth means theres 4 bytes of color data per pixel, which is 921,600 bytes per screen, i.e. 922 kilobytes of raw data.

as i said above, usb2.0 can handle 60 kb per second, and pci can handle 133... and those are theoretical maximums. i'm not an expert on how data arrays for how a picture is derived, but it looks to me that neither usb2.0 or pci buses can deal with even a frame a second raw data. so some type of compression must be used in the hardware of the card, pci or usb2.0 in order to capture real time video. or i could be insanely inaccurate in my math of how much data is in a screenshot. i really don't know.

im just alittle curious how pci cards could be affected by the cpu in any way... what kind of interference would mess with a pci card but not agp cards?

also, usb 2.0 is routed through the pci bus, it isnt directly controlled by the north bridge, so... usb2.0 should deal with the same interferences then, no? where did you hear all that from?

as for specific products i have NFI. i was told that pinnacle's newer products are really good, but i don't know what kind of features they have.
 
Originally posted by sackowitz
if your capture card captures at 32 bit color depth, at standard tv resolution 480x480, that means theres 480 times 480 pixels during a single frame, which is a total of 230400 pixels. 32 bit depth means theres 4 bytes of color data per pixel, which is 921,600 bytes per screen, i.e. 922 kilobytes of raw data.

as i said above, usb2.0 can handle 60 kb per second, and pci can handle 133... and those are theoretical maximums. i'm not an expert on how data arrays for how a picture is derived, but it looks to me that neither usb2.0 or pci buses can deal with even a frame a second raw data. so some type of compression must be used in the hardware of the card, pci or usb2.0 in order to capture real time video. or i could be insanely inaccurate in my math of how much data is in a screenshot. i really don't know.

im just alittle curious how pci cards could be affected by the cpu in any way... what kind of interference would mess with a pci card but not agp cards?

also, usb 2.0 is routed through the pci bus, it isnt directly controlled by the north bridge, so... usb2.0 should deal with the same interferences then, no? where did you hear all that from?

as for specific products i have NFI. i was told that pinnacle's newer products are really good, but i don't know what kind of features they have.
Click to expand...
what you say is generally correct, you're off by a factor of 1024 tho.
 
thank you for correcting me jeef ;)

wow, so there's only 900 bytes of data in a screenshot of 480x480 at 32bit color.

again i'm no professional... but that means that if you captured at 100 fps, then you'd need a throughput of 90,000 bytes per second, or 90 kbps.

if usb2.0 can only THEORETICALLY handle 60kbps, then usb 2.0 could handle a maximum of 66.6 frames per second. in all actuality though, i thought most standard video cassete recorders took around 30-35 frames per second.

if thats correct then neither usb or pci should drop any frames at all from home videos.... i'm sure the engineers thought about it long before i did but i'm stoned and it feels like an epiphone for me... so just humor me please and pretend like i'm smart :cool:

i just don't know about this whole interference from the cpu for a pci card, i've never ever heard anything along the lines of cpu creating some kind of electromagnetic interference. i thought your crt monitor and maybe your speaker magnets could create interference that could cause problems.
 
The Interference thing comes from old days. But there was definatly a link between CPU usage and image quality when I was using a WIN-TV card. WE actaully tracked this down to insufficent sheilding of the RF receiver (My father helped track this down he's a RF engineer)

I Don't know if there has been any major improvements on this scene but with USB version the signal is digital before it enters the confinds of the PC case and as such is more immune to EM interference.

AS for what the interference showed ups was a poor image quality and even some intermodulation (Ghosting).

That's why i was inclined to go with USB as well as Hardware MPEG 2 encoding. However If someone could post a screen shot of a PCI card in action I would be more than happy to take advantage of the greater bandwith of the PCI bus.

Once thing that does concern me is the software encoding of MPEG2 It just last time i did any capturing the CPU compression was the problem of dropping frames. However with MPEG 2 compression it would be just a stream and not really all that much for the CPU to handle. Also I would be capturing it at native DVD resolution with is like 7??x4XX - i can't remember the exact details.
 
Originally posted by ilkka
If I were doing what you were doing, I would probably use my DV video camera to transfer the video to the computer. It has video inputs, and it has very good picture quality. With that there are no worries of missed frames or bad compression, etc. I would rather use that than by TV tuner card.

But if you don't have such a convinient camera, then look for something else.
Click to expand...

For pure video conversion, I agree with ilkka. I've done this a lot too. Use your DV camera as a bridge between a VCR and your computer (via firewire). The quality is decent and it's really easy. You'll be surprised. Not sure if you have either the camera or the DV card, but it's a solution that many people overlook in favour of a capture card.

My two cents.
 
jnex - its interesting to hear that interference was noted - particularly regarding RF modulation / frequencies. evne though usb2.0 is routed through the pci bus, theres no phycal modulation chips inside the case so it shouldnt pose a problem, like you say.

i see no problem with usb2.0 capture as long as the home video framerates are around 30-35fps... again i'm not sure about that. i do find it strange that pci capture cards don't have hardware encoding though... i wonder if theres a big price diff between usb and pci capture cards because of this.

anyway, sounds like all this back n forth maybe helped clear up a few things for you. good luck in your capture endeavors :)
 
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