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Recommendations on a decent TV card?

JinXD

JinXD

Member
I'm looking for a good TV card for my box to firstly watch/record tv progs onto my PC, and secondly I'd like to play around with hooking up a few of my consoles (NGC, DC, N64, SNES) and play them on my monitor.

Any advise would be appreciated!
 
Eagle

Eagle

aka Alshain
Moderator
JinXD said:
I'm looking for a good TV card for my box to firstly watch/record tv progs onto my PC, and secondly I'd like to play around with hooking up a few of my consoles (NGC, DC, N64, SNES) and play them on my monitor.

Any advise would be appreciated!
Click to expand...

Go with Hauppauge, they are the best. The best bet is the WinTV USB2, but you have to have USB 2 compatible ports. If not go for the WinTV USB. The reason I say USB is because it works just as good, but its portable so if you own or ever own a laptop you can just pick up and go. They do however cost a little more.
 
ScottJC

ScottJC

At your service, dood!
I have a different opinion.. I've went through three Hauppauge cards, all of them shit... the USB one being the worst, you can't do any capturing, the most expensive one I had was a second behind the actual source... I would avoid them completely.. but thats me...

I go for Leadtek Winfast 2000 expert edition, simply because its cheap and its better than all 3 of the haucrap cards i've had.

http://www.leadtek.com/multimedia/winfast_tv2000xp_expert_1.html

It is perfect for capturing tv content, does it better than hauppauge and is in perfect sync with the TV signal.
 
Eagle

Eagle

aka Alshain
Moderator
ScottJC said:
I have a different opinion.. I've went through three Hauppauge cards, all of them shit... the USB one being the worst, you can't do any capturing, the most expensive one I had was a second behind the actual source... I would avoid them completely.. but thats me...

I go for Leadtek Winfast 2000 expert edition, simply because its cheap and its better than all 3 of the haucrap cards i've had.

http://www.leadtek.com/multimedia/winfast_tv2000xp_expert_1.html

It is perfect for capturing tv content, does it better than hauppauge and is in perfect sync with the TV signal.
Click to expand...

Leadtek is a good cheap alternative to Hauppage but they lack in the technical support department and I've heard that their brand new cards have to go in for replacement quite often. On the other hand, Leadtek's capture software is far superior to Hauppauge which means for most applications you don't have to buy additional software. Hauppage works great, any lag behind the source was probably either your system or the software. I've never seen any video cap card I've used lag behind the source unless the system itself was just too slow.
 
Eagle

Eagle

aka Alshain
Moderator
Eagle said:
Leadtek is a good cheap alternative to Hauppage
Click to expand...

I take that back, after a little searching Leadtek's cards are upwards of $30 USD compared to the Hauppauge cards.
 
-Shadow-

-Shadow-

Banned
I use a pinnacle PCTV Rave, it never disappointed me. The only drawback is the software packed with the card: PAL-60hz isn't selectable and it only captures uncompressed Video, which means 6 Minutes Video = 260Mb and no possibility to play games like Metroid Prime 2 with that software properly :plain:
You should stick to Dscaler, then. It supports compressed video capture, heaps of Video modes ( PAL-60 included ) and lots of De-interlace modes.

If you aren't interested into uber hardware faetures, a pinnacle card is a good choice
 
ScottJC

ScottJC

At your service, dood!
well mine was only £40 as compared to the £120 broken hauppauge one I had, which was a second behind the tv so absolutely useless for gaming, and no its not software it was a hardware thing, it just did that... it broke about a month or two after i got it and i hadn't even used it that much.

I owned a USB one, quality was apauling, it was slow and it had no ability to capture at all.

The first one i had wasn't bad, cost as much as the leadtek one but its quality was pretty rubbish and capturing was near impossible.

After those three joyus cards I wouldn't touch hauppauge with a barge poll, maybe its just their UK devision that sucks ass.

The quality of my current leadtek card is far surpassing all of them in quality and capture ability.
 
Niggy G

Niggy G

HTAFC will rise again!!!
I had the Nova-T card from happuage and their support was shocking! stay away from these people if you ever want your software to be updated.
A really good card which supports video and audio in is the Nebula Electronics Digi TV card http://www.nebula-electronics.com/ .

Its also DVB so you get all the freeview channels, their a smallish company so they look after their customers very well. The software is very good and is constantly being improved.

You'll have to check its availability in your country though, :)
 
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ScottJC

ScottJC

At your service, dood!
Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250... that name makes my blood boil.. its the expensive one i bought that broke *goes berserk*...!
 
zAlbee

zAlbee

Keeper of The Iron Tail
And that's why i bought my ATI All-in-Wonder 8500. :) No problems whatsoever watching hockey and playing consoles (xbox). TV as desktop and alpha blending are sweet.
 
ScottJC

ScottJC

At your service, dood!
Heres a Sample of something I have captured off the TV, its from "The Fairly Odd Parents", its a cartoon on Nickelodeon I *used* to watch..

*Edit: Url removed, I'd rather not waste bandwidth on my webserver, sorry... I believe it has served its purpose*

Specs: 640X480; Running time: 1 minute 1 second; Codec: DivX; FPS: 25, 4:3 ratio; 12MB

I made this by encoding in mpeg2 on a live feed and then converted it to DivX with two pass @ 1200 bitrate, with mp3 audio.

I believe that the quality of my captures is very high quality :D

I should probably use XviD someday but... i'm just so darn.. lazy ;)
 
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OP
JinXD

JinXD

Member
Thanks for all the responses, especially the two captures from Falcon4ever and ScottJC!! I'll wait til the new year before I check out the cards you've all recommended, once I can think/see clearly ;)
 
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