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Can anyone help me pick a good capture card for under $200? I'm looking to capture footage directly from a variety of console systems: Dreamcast, PS2, Saturn, PS1, Xbox (in order of frequency/importance). I don't need monster resolution since most of my clips will end up in the 320x240 range anyway. I do need the capture card to give me good recordings the first time around, because i don't want to have to repeat combos 5 times to get one clean clip without artifacts. Of course, video quality matters.

Story of my old Dazzle DVC capture card wrote:Maj: one time i tried hooking up a laptop to my tv
Maj: via s-video cable
Maj: fried the monitor
Maj: sony products own up hp warranties
omni: rotfl
omni: are you serious?
omni: HAHAHA
Maj: yeah, always on the second time
Maj: that kid i used to know in germany sent me some ps2 cvs2 replays to cap
Maj: so i did that, worked fine
Maj: second time i tried to cap anything, it was some cfj stuff and it fried my computer
Maj: sent it in for warranty repairs, got it back, plugged it in to test, it worked
Maj: had some free time that evening, so i decided to try capping again
Maj: fried my laptop again
Maj: few weeks later, my dad was being grumpy about having to watch some shogun samurai movie on his laptop
Maj: so i noticed the laptop had s-video out and went to buy some ghetto cable from radio shack to hook it up
Maj: worked fine
Maj: then my dad had some friends over so he had me hook it up again
Maj: laptop screen went blank
Maj: just white, with a few one-pixel color lines in some parts
Maj: hella burnt out
Maj: sony playstation 2, sony wega, sony dvd/video player
omni: man
Maj: vs two different model hp laptops
Maj: sony 3 - hp 0

So that's how my capture card died. Owned up two laptop motherboards and burned out the front input slots on my DVD/VCR combo player. Of course, omni found it funny cuz he's a bully working at Sony.

lol, wow


Well, depends on what format you want to capture, MPEG2 or AVI. I have ATI TV Wonder PRO (I suggest that you dont get it if you want to capture MPEG2). I know you hate doing this but go to http://www.videohelp.com and look through the capture card recommendations.

I suggest not getting the capture card I have cause of the software it comes with (for capping mpeg1/2). What really makes me scratch my head is that the newest version of the software I tried didn't allow you to capture interlaced video for some reason...Also, the frame rate wasn't consistent! The Tech Support guy answered my interlace and frame rate questions by saying

"No, sorry"

...

Don't get ATI

Get a BT878 or something like that based card, and make sure you can capture using other software as well as the bundled software. I bought this AVC capture once and that shit only let me capture in mpeg1/2 ONLY using their shitty software. The one I'm using now was free (somebody threw it out), and it has RF/composite/S-video/radio and it lets you capture using Virtual VCR (the best capture program imo) and VirtualDub.

I capture using lossless codecs, so I can get things at the best possible quality using S-video.

http://hauppage.com/pages/prods_pci.html

I used a WinTV-Go for everything I did. (Shut up, Magnetro, the source was sharp.) $50, no joke, and it captures 320x240 @ 60 Hz, which was more than good enough for me, or 640x480 @ 30 Hz de-interlaced. It handled uncompressed and various compressions, though that's mostly your software (some cards can output compressed video directly). If you're a snob, then be snobby and pooh-pooh it, but I never had a problem. We recorded matches and everything, and it has S-video... I heard they did one with HDMI/Component in, but I can't find it on their site so that's probably not true.

I "perma-loaned" it to Thongboy, at least for another week, so if he ever uses it he can share his opinion. Make the damn videos, TBBB! Oh yeah, it doesn't have audio in, so you get sound by plugging it into your mic in.
Can't beat $50 unless you find one in the trash, though.

Mike Z

Hauppage and Pinnacle seem to have the longest and most notable track records when it comes to tv cards. Stay away from all-in-one packages (damn ATI all-in-wonderfulICantCaptureNTSC). Gotta make sure it has at the very least an S-Video input.

The thing I hate about consumer electronics is that it's all marketed towards a broad and not-so-knowledgable audience. The reason I say this is because you will need to look very hard to find out which decoder chipset is on any particular card. If you can somehow find out, you'll be well off with the Brooktree BTxxx series and the Philips SAxxxxx series. The older Pinnacle PCTV used brooktree chips, but the one I got PCTV Stereo uses the Philips chipset. I'm really happy with the quality so far. Stay away from older cards because legacy drivers won't cut it with some of the newer sofware. DScaler is a wonderful piece of software and it supports both those chipsets. I bought my card specifically because I knew it would work with DScaler. Might be interesting to look up their card compatibility list on their site.

I'd say, go with a Pinnacle product because they're barebones (which also means cheaper) and have only the things you need to capture video. Don't be fooled by feature lists like "Pause live TV!" and "Record in Mpeg 1/2!" because none of that is on-board functionality, both those features come from software that is packaged with the card. I have never worked with an external USB capture device, but it shouldn't be any different. If all you want is video, you shouldn't spend more than $70. Try and get OEM version, because all that packaged software is usually crap anyway.

The systems i'm planning on capturing from are Dreamcast, Saturn, and PS2. Would those cards capture at 60fps from these sources reliably without artifacts appearing? Cuz i really don't want to deal with that bullshit. I don't mind paying $200 for a good card as long as i know that it's going to be hassle-free. It just needs to capture video and audio, and i don't need to pay for any fancy software or compression.

What determines how much data can be captured per second? If i could capture uncompressed, that would be perfect. But that depends on hard drive speed and other PC performance capabilities right?

The amount od data you can save per second (for uncompressed video) depends mostly on the HDD speed, and amount of RAM (so that other softwares don't use the HDD as pseudo-RAM).

Also, I know my card can't capture 60fps, because even if I set my capture program to capture at 60fps, the video processor on the capture feeds interlaced 30fps video so the capture software discards every other frame because they're duplicates. So it'd be nice to check and/or ask for 60fps capable capture cards on the srk forums or the doom9 forums.

I'm not aware of any cards that capture fields seperately, but that doesn't matter, because 30 fps interlaced is all the data you could possibly get from your ntsc signal. If you capture 60 fps video then it's the same data as 30 fps interlaced, only with fields being seperated into their own frames. If cards offer this feature I wouldn't be surprised to find out it was something that is done at software level (after actual capturing has already been completed).

As for artifacts, any noise you get from capturing is due to the quality of the source and the electro magnetic interference the cable is exposed to before it reaches the capture card. Other than that capturing doens't produce 'artifacts' per se, it only influences the sharpness of the image. Artifacts is what you get from processing that happens on your computer after it has been captured due to stuff like deinterlacing or compression. So if the software you use gives artifacts then it's probably not giving you the exact data from the hardware, but is doing some sort of processing on it before writing to disk.

Anyway, more on point: yes, those cards will be able to capture the things you want at the speed you want. There is free software available for getting the best out your tv card, so if you dont' care for packaged software, look for the OEM versions of the cards you want to buy.

It's true that HDD speed is the slowest link in the video-capturing chain, but even my old 5400 rpm P-ATA disk has enough juice to write all the data. So, that shouldn't be a problem. As for other performance issues, all the cards won't differ much in the amount of bandwidth they require. So, freeing up processor capacity and RAM before capture is something you need to do allways, regardless of what card you end up buying. That being said, people have been able to capture lossless video without dropped frames for many years, so any semi-modern computer can pull it off.

Hm, ok, let me clarify my position. Right now all i have is a laptop and video game consoles. I don't have a capture card and i don't have a desktop computer less than 4 years old. In fact i use my laptop for just about everything related to work.

I'm planning on buying a new desktop computer and a new capture card, along with a new TV. I'm probably going to get a little 13" to 15" TV to put on my desk next to my computer monitor. Essentially the sole purpose of this desktop computer is going to be to capture and edit video. Every once in a while i'll open up Word or Excel to fool myself into believing that the computer serves a justifiable productive purpose.

Is there some elegant way to accomplish this without having to buy these three things separately?

If not, then is there anything specific that i should look for when buying the computer or the TV? I heard that a lot of modern TV's have input lag when dealing with older video game consoles so i'm not even sure what to buy on that front.

Sounds like you already got your plans worked out. You should do as you said. Though you don't 'need' the TV.

Is there another way without buying those 3 things? Well yes, you could buy a USB capture device and do it all on your laptop. You could also buy a PCI card and use your 4-year-old computer to do the capturing only (should work, though I don't know your specs), and then bring them over to the laptop for editing. I have an Athlon XP 2600+ and a regular ATA disk and I can capture fine. So I guess those are your options ranging from most expensive to cheapest.

As for TV having signal delay. I don't know much about this. I do know with all the additional hardware going into TV's these days for signal processing and other junk, that it's not that surprising if there is a signal delay. However, if you're going to buy a tiny tv like you said you are, you won't have any problems with delays because there's nothing very useful they could do with the signal. Don't take my word for it, ask the staff at where you buy the TV and hope you don't ge tthe guy that "just works there", I'm sure they'll give you better info than me.

The pattern i noticed with TVs that lag with old game systems is that they display content in progressive mode by default. This is true for almost all the hdtv's out there. The thing to look for is if the TV says it has some type of "Game Mode" as one of the features. If you're buying an lcd or a plasma they usually tell you how much lag they have if they have game mode (they're usually under 10ms). If you're getting a CRT, I guess try to see if it has game mode.

Although my camcorder's lcd screen isn't lag-free probably, but i don't see lag on it. So I would bring a camcorder to the TV store and plug the AV out into the TV while comparing it with the camcorder's lcd sreen. Most of the time, lag on modern TVs is easy to spot.

I'm not sure if you're talking about response time laugh, if that's the case that isn't the same thing as lag. Response time is how long it takes the TFT elements/pixels to go from full on (white) to full off (black). This will give you an idea of how much after-image you can expect. That's also important for gaming, but it's not the same as lag. Lag would be the time between the signal reaching the tv and the time it shows up on screen.

So um, which of these am i supposed to buy again?

1) Pinnacle Pctv Pci Internal Pci Tv Tuner
2) Studio Movieboard Pci Capture Hardware
3) Studio Movieboard Plus PCI Hardware

Or were you recommending something completely different? Sorry, i'm still hella rookie at this. Those are the only internal cards i saw at amazon.

Each of those willdo what you want them to do. #3 is nice if you have a digital camcorder, cus it has the firewire input for DV. So if you ever want to use it for htat, your all set. Bringing your footage from your DV source (camcorder) to your pc through firewire is lossless and way faster than capturing/digitizing from an analog source (composite/s-viddeo/coax).

#1 is more barebones and therefor cheaper, but it'll capture at the rate and quality you want. However, I like the movieboard adverts better they give much better info for it.

#2 apparently has something I've never heard of before, NTSC analog over 6 pin serial firewire... which sounds dumb, cus serial implies its digital. Must be a mistake on their part.

All three of them seem overpriced on Amazon, I bet you could get them cheaper elsewhere. Anyway, I'd personally go for the Pinnacle card, because I have one and I'm happy with it.... also, I'm cheap and it's the cheapest one.

All three are made by Pinnacle i think. The DV camcorder thing sounds interesting, though probably costs way more than i'm willing to spend. Wouldn't you get lossyness (or whatever) where you plug the console into the camcorder?

I think i'm gonna go with the second one and the price doesn't look too bad. I'll spend a few minutes looking around for a better deal on it but i was expecting to have to spend like $200 on a capture card so 75 bucks is fine.

Maj wrote:All three are made by Pinnacle i think. The DV camcorder thing sounds interesting, though probably costs way more than i'm willing to spend. Wouldn't you get lossyness (or whatever) where you plug the console into the camcorder?

Woot, you're finally gonna get a new capture card. Congrats.

I plug the s-video cable from my consoles into my camcorder so it's hardly lossy.

As much loss as you'd get from plugging it into anything else. It's minimal.

So i bought a Visco 20" LCD TV to go with my Dreamcast. It seemed like a good deal and i'm sure it'll be useful. Check out what it says in the manual:

Visco VSC-20V1 Owner's Manual wrote:Introduction
1-1 Before Use

Please you go through our brief specification as below to get a understanding about our LCD TV basic feature and connectivity before you use our LCD TV to watch TV or other video source. When you skimmed through this page, I think it will bring you to know about our product specification and if you want to know more about how to adjust our TV and how to link up which equipment can completely maximize our LCD TV's performance. Please keep going to read the following pages. At last after you have finished reading the instructions, put the away in a safe place for future reference.

Now imagine how badly they must have fucked up the French and Spanish translations. Made in China, bitches!

Ok, so now i've got my capture card installed. Also installed Pinnacle Studio 10 software which came with the card. Is there some other, more better software i should be using to capture? I've got no problem with using whatever software they supplied, but maybe that sort of thing is frowned upon. Plz educate me, kthx.

It should give you the best results, since who would know better how to get quality captures from your card than the people who made it, right?... right? But seriously, I don't see why not, unless of course there is a specific feature you want that you're not getting, like on the fly colorspace conversion from YUY to RGB. I dunno what the software you're using is like, but for me.. all I really need is:
-performance: so you don't drop frames
-screen width of 720 and appropriate vertical resolution
-raw data (no on the fly deinterlacing other filters that you can't turn off)
-free choice of encoder

Tried using the included software, but for some reason it won't let me capture in uncompressed AVI. The options are DV and MJPEG. Tried capturing with VirtualDub and it let me capture in uncompressed AVI just fine. No skipped frames, either. Think i'll stick with VirtualDub.

This isn't a problem so much as an oddity, but i thought i'd mention it anyway. Since the capture card i bought has no audio inputs, they included a cable that plugs into my computer's Line-In input and splits into red and white audio ends.

When i plug the console's red cord into the cable's red end and the white into the white, the captured audio comes out flipped. Sounds on the left side come out of the right speaker. When i noticed this i simply switched the cables so that the console's red cord is plugged into the cable's white end and vice versa. Works just fine now. Why they would label it backwards?

No Audio inputs? Sounds kinda ghetto.

I'm looking for an External Capture card so that way I can use it at work and use at home.

I saw this one at Best Buy this weekend. any reason why I should or should not buy it?

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp ... 2291505775

Thanks

Derek Daniels
http://lowfierce.blogspot.com

Unfortunately the technical specifications page for that card doesn't list the decoder chipset, so i dunno if it matches up with the ones recommended earlier in this thread. However, Dazzle is owned by Pinnacle these days so hopefully they use the same internal components. Btw, it looks like that store is selling it for $4 over MSRP.

Your best bet is probably to buy it and try to capture video using VirtualDub, cuz you'd probably get more options that way than if you used the included software. The program that came with the Pinnacle card i bought didn't let me capture in uncompressed AVI but it was very easy to do with VirtualDub. If it doesn't work, return it and try another brand.

Unless there's any huge glaring problem that i'm overlooking, it looks fine to me. When i first started making videos, i used a Dazzle Digital Video Creator too. It was terrible. Capture artifacts everywhere. But that was a long time ago plus i was trying to capture at the highest bitrate it would allow. I'm sure by now they've eliminated most of those issues. And mine wasn't made of Platinum, which probably improves performance by at least 9700%.

I don't think capture cards are the way to go.

I have an s-video splitter from Radio shack that I feed my Dreamcast into, with 4 outputs. One goes to the TV of course. The delay through the splitter is negligible and does not affect gameplay. The 2nd output goes to my DVD recorder, which can go up to 8 hours of recording, altho I have the setting at 3. 3 Seems to be a most I can go without damage to quality. I just pop a blank in and hit record and capture 3 hours worth of matches. As soon as I hit stop and eject, I can pop that DVD into a computer and edit to my heart's content. That way I don't need my computer by my gaming area and can still play on the big screen without delay.

Does anyone know of a decent capture card that handles Component video and/or HDMI?

/ Bomberman brings up a good subject, i'm really interested in this too.

http://www.videoguys.com/pyroAVlink.html <~ I was thinking of buying that one 'cause it's pretty cheap and it looks like it'll work and not blow up. Vidness, where you at?

The capture card I have for HD is called the Intensity Pro. It had hdmi in AND component in. I built a machine around it, 6000+ amdx2 with 4 gig of pc667 mem. 500gig hd (7200rpm). I can capture PS3 via component, but not HDMI for some reason. I can capture X360 either hdmi or component. So I have a component selector with the 360, ps3, wii, old xbox, and ps2 all connected, so I can select which hd component I want to record at any time. I'm attempting to get component from the dreamcast with a vga box (just got yesterday) and a vga to component cable. I seem to be having some issues capturing, since 640x480 isn't a standard tv output resolution...but I am hopeful I can get something working for this...once I am finished, I will definitely let you guys see the results.

Also, capturing 720P at 42 FPS...I can capture 1080i at only 9 fps But hey, 720P is good enough for me...also it takes up mad disk space...so get some storage! The motherboard I bought also came with a vidcard that has HDMI out, which is SOOO sweet, so I can use the pc on the HD TV and see what I capture at the same time....very nice setup.

Oh, I also forgot to mention that I also bought a component SPLITTER with two outputs, so one side goes to the capture card, and the other goes to the TV, so that I don't experience any delay on the gameplay. Ping me if you want to see a sample of Tekken DR captured at 720p

OK. I REALLY LUCKED OUT HERE.

I bought a new cc cause my old one was old and it didn't work with my new pc. So I randomly chose a WinFast PXTV1200 and i only chose it for s-video. i didnt really expect it to work because the ATI TV WONDER PRO (yes all caps) was an abysmal failure and I wasn't expecting much from anything. However, i was surprised when it got here cause it had component (yipper) in. I can recommend this one to anyone as long as they use virtualdub or something else instead of the software it comes with <3

http://www.leadtek.com/fr/tv_tuner/over ... nameid=355

i'm capturing component in from ps2 and it looks awesome compared to s-video!

Looks like Joo got his wish. It seems he's able to capture RGB/VGA quality Marvel vs. Capcom 2 now. Along with other games.

http://www.geocities.co.jp/Playtown-Dom ... bolog3.htm

My guess is he went for the 3,000 dollar setup (2 thousand dollar PC and one thousand dollar capture card)


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