I found an old video capture card, is it at all useful?

[915harrison]

While looking through my attic I found an old Pinnacle Systems Bendino V1. 0A and I have know idea what it does except when googling it I found it is a "Video capture card" and I was wondering what does this do and if it is at ALL useful, even a little bit, because I have spare PCI slots and I'm interested why my dad bought it.

Thank you

 

[Paperdoc]

That's an old card, and I could not find a manual for it on-line. If you have a manual, that would make your life easier.

The card has two inputs - Composite and S-Video- and two similar outputs. It also has a IEEE 1394 (Firewire 400) port, but I can't tell whether it is for input, output or both.

A video capture card has three basic functions. It must accept video in some standard format, capture each frame, digitize that frame using some CODEC, then store it on a hard drive as a file. One file contains an entire captured video, but there will be some limit on the length of "one video". That card does NOT appear to have a way to capture audio at the same time, so how that MIGHT be done with an additional audio capture device is another question. From the inputs, this card only accepts some relatively common ANALOG video signals - does not capture digital video. There will certainly be limits on the resolution of the captured images (depends mainly on the speed of the card's video conversion chip), so likely close to TV resolution which is what we might compare now to "480p" quality. It will have a limited number of file formats it can save things under.

Using such a device normally requires a suitable software package. They often came with such a tool. But whether that older software will run under your current system is a big question.

If you're really interested in video capture today, there are good new designs of card that handle modern video signals with fast processors and use new CODECS and file formats to make good clear image conversions, including capturing sound and storing it in the saved file. There are also combination TV tuner cards that can do the video capture functions as well. They might suit your needs better if this is a field you want to pursue.