which capture card to buy?

[mrtj]

right now i have an ati aiw 16mb but i need something better for capturing at high quality. can anyone recommend a card that's better than this one?

also,

if i try to use virtualdub to capture, it doesnt work properly. i think it is to do with motion estimation settings that are available in the ati capture settings, which are probably set to 0 for other programs so any movement creates a lot of distortions. any idea how to get around this problem since ati only allows their own codecs to be used in their tv program.

 

[Guest]

I'm not sure of the capture options out there, but I am considering buying that card - what problems/limits are you having? Any other problems that you have with the card in general?

What OS are you running on? I will be using it for Win2K, but I've heard some horror stories re: ATI cards on Win2K.

 

[mrtj]

the capture card works fine if you capture with ati's tv program. i want a card that can capture to higher than 720x576 or higher than 8mbit/sec in mpeg-2

 

[Guest]

Check ati's website for the ATI TV-Wonder. It is not a video card or a graphics card, but strictly a high level TV card. Unlike TV add-in cards that only allow limited capture of stills or poor quality avi, the TV Wonder captures full Mpeg quality video, as in TIVO or DVR quality. You can set the machine to digitally record tv shows to a hard drive just like the Tivo machines. The tv-wonder VE *value edition* only captures avi, but the full tv wonder does Mpeg2 recording. I think the retail is about $60.
Hope this helps
Frank