Hi Trichome,

Do you need a Cable Box in front of this card? Can it recieve Digital & Analog signal (maybe that doesn't matter)?

Have you tried video captures?

Thanks a bunch!

Yes you will need cable or satellite box to decipher channel encoding unless you can use a regular antenna. It will handle both D and A video.
I have captuered with mine to:.avi, .mpg with no problems.
The quality is good but not great... definately watchable.

Cheers.

the quality can be great.
Capture in 720x480 or 720x576 (depending on your target, the 768 res of Conexant Fusion 878 or CX23880/881 capture cards/AGP-onboard-features could also be considered).
Capture into MJPEG or DV (PICvideo/Matrox-digisuite-codecs or MainConcept-DV) using a non-Sony and probably not the software that comes with the capture card.
I use www.ShowShifter.com which even allows uncompressed capture of 4:2:2 YUY2 media, albeit at best S-Video (always use good cables). Audio stays in-sync with the modern AC97/soundblaster or better sound features not normally on the same card as the video capture too.

As an AVI file, these 4:2:2 files should be better than the NTSC 4:1:1 your DV camera might be able to digitise for you. Especially if your final output is 4:2:2 or even DVD-Video. YMMV.

These cards have been "missed out" by videographers as they don't have their own TV-out (or it isn't as good quality as the capture) and also when they first came to market, PCs could overlay TV, but capture was a bit too much for them. So only in the last couple of years, we've received the drivers to open up the full resolution capture capability (and the grunt to do something with it on a modern PC).

ShowShifter has given me some trouble where I am using my PC has a personal video recorder for more than a couple of gigabyte files (it spews multiple AVIs which is fine for Win98, but I'd rather it made a single big one). I think the PICvideo MJPEG codec, or Vegas isn't quite a good match, so I'm about to start capturing with the Matrox DigiSuite MJPEG codecs from within ShowShifter and I'll stitch those files into DVD or MJPEG OpenDML2 multi-gig AVIs (using Vegas) for my timeshift recordings. I miss a lot of TV, and like to have a quality playback of what I/family want to watch when I'm on vacation over Xmas.

I've seen a few cards start to appear over here that can capture the SD or HD mpeg stream to HDD off DVB. I guess you couldn't get any better quality than that.

I'm amazed it's been let happen, Having a HiDef copy of a movie makes pirating DVDs seem a bit lame.

The protection flags in the transport streams from the broadcaster are supposed to engage DMCA technology to prevent the capture application from connecting to the stream for anything more than a hardware overlay. Whatever method is used, copy-proof it'll probably never be.

Just that a view-only SD/HD MPEG-2/DVB card would sell a lot less. So some use proprietary software to make exchanging more difficult but repeated use is generally possible.

Quite often a broadcast MPEG-2 SD or HD DVB stream is a poor relative to the recorded/shop-bought equivalent SD version. I say poor, as subjectively they can be about the same. Who knows if pre-recorded HD (other than D-VHS) will be as majestic?

Much as DVB SD - MPEG-2 is remarkable and gives widescreen and surround options that don't take much for the receiver to give a rendition upon. The quality of analogue broadcast is being cheapened and this is where a film thief (for SD-DVD-Video) would probably be best to place his acquisition software. Sometimes this depends on the FCC/CE etc channel allocation, modulation and adjacency.

If digital is the only presentation, a direct bit transfer, as you say farss, isn't going to get any better if it is captured after turning into analogue again.

The future of SD and HD media is probably going to be uncompressed 4:4:4. Probably in a solid state form in my lifetime and possibly over a distance with a broadcast system in my son's lifetime.

I hope to teach my son to not copy and at worst to only timeshift TV/films that he hasn't bought. I can't agree with being forced to not skip the advertising on channels which aren't otherwise funded.

I'd expect the encryption systems to be built to suit the type of media being broadcast and for some aspects of that system to make the early adopters of HD and some SD DVB systems to have to update this equipment like we do our PCs today. I do expect to pay something for what I get on my screen, I'll pay more if I'm wanting to watch something but am in the minority (special interest, historical, legacy TV etc).

You can purchase any one of several capture cards that will capture full-size, full-motion, high quality video to your hard disk. Read about them at:

AVS Forum

I have the ATI Radeon 8500 DV.

In theory, they should, as has already been pointed out, be able to capture better quality video than what you get by using your DV or Digital8 camcorder as an external encoder. This is because DV uses 4:1:1 color encoding, thus compromising the color space, whereas these cards can connect to almost any encoding codec, including the free Huffy codec, most of which encode in 4:2:2 or higher.

However, in practice, I have so far been unable to capture video that I found as good as what I get via the DV camcorder route. Much of this has to do with the capture drivers. ATI in particular has the worst technical support of any company on the face of the earth, and also has a software development team that isn't able to create decent drivers. Besides being prone to crashes, and besides having all sorts of problems (read about them here: Rage3D Forums -- click on the All-In-Wonder, TV Wonder, and Remote Wonder Discussion link), the real problem is that the default settings in either the driver or in DirectX sets the video levels in ways that results in a very contrasty picture.

Finally, if you want to capture using the built-in tuner, most people have found the result to be too noisy (again, refer to the two forums above). If you use a capture card, you should only use it to capture composite or S-video inputs, not RF.

Thanks for all the replies, seems like this one will do the trick for me - but before I decide - anyone have any experience with Hauppage?

http://www.hauppauge.com/html/wintvpvr250_datasheet.htm

I originally looked at the discontinued model by Hauppage: http://www.hauppauge.com/html/wintvpvr_datasheet.htm . This is the only model which captures AVI, but Hauppage tech support / sales claim that the MPEG encoding of their 250 card does not lose that much quality. So given that it's discontinued / more expensive / quality loss may not be an issue, 250 may be a good choice.

Serge