I am considering on buying a Mpeg-1 encoder card. Vitec RT-6 sample looks good. Broadway-Pro 4.5 is also good. I've not seen the DVMPegator sample yet, but i've seen the M-filter result(not too good, too blocky). I've seen the best yet result from Optibase MovieMaker Pro, but it's about $2500.00. If anyone is using any of this product(s), please forward any information (pros & cons). Thanks.

-- lnguyen (wingstarzz@hotmail.com), February 07, 2000

Answers

M-Filter is not an mpeg-1 capture device, it is simply a hardware filteration system that filters the incomming video and sends that to the mpeg encoder thus making much better looking mpeg.

I would get it if I were you

-- MrVCD (mrvcd@juno.com), February 07, 2000.

MrVcd, Thanks for the input. It's done with the M-filter. Now for the capture board. Which one is better? Broadway Pro or Vitec RT-6? Have heard a lot of pros and cons from Broadway card but so far none from RT-6. Have you or anyone have experience with the Vitec RT-6 card? Both of these cards are about the same price range. I appreciate any inputs...

-- lnguyen (wingstarzz@hotmail.com), February 07, 2000.

I'm not sure about the other capture cards but I think it's not worth buying RT6. I've got RT6 and it doesn't seem to produce good quality mpeg at all. I wanted to return it but they didn't allow me to return it and the sellman said that he haven't heard any quality problem reported from others. I tried my best already but I still can't get it to capture at good quality.

-- Tai (thvo1@hotmail.com), November 17, 2000.

I have Broadway Pro 4.5 and am happy with it. Produces good I-MPEG- based AVIs and good MPEGs when converted from AVI to MPEG. I don't recommend using it to capture straight to MPEG. Results that way are ok but not great. Only caveat with BWay is that it only captures at 352x240 with no options for other resolutions. Kinda ridiculous that BWay Pro 5.0 touts support for DVD MPEG2 because DVD MPEG2 resolution is much higher than what BWay Pro can capture. Seems pretty brain- dead to capture to 352x240 and then convert to 720x480 and then encode to MPEG2. Seems like you'd need to capture at DVD resolution to get the expected results.

Also, I don't know why, but BWay's tech support website is horribly outdated. I sent them an email asking when it will be updated and have never received a response...

Kevin

-- kevin (kevin@kevcat.com), November 17, 2000.

Just buy a capture card and a new harddrive. Then use TMPG to encode overnight intstead of buying a half-quality hardware card.

You could probably get a capcard, harddrive, and new processor for the same price as an encoder if you looked.

-- FunOne (FunOne@tyler.net), November 17, 2000.