I have seen a lot of Broadway cards for sale lately, whats up with that? Are they no good or have you found a better card?

-- teeball (tlbake@earthlink.net), November 06, 2000

Answers

I have BWay Pro 4.5 and it's great for making VCDs. Much better than using a standard AVI capture card and then converting to MPEG1 with software like Xing. I was interested to see if anyone has played with the DVD/MPEG2 capabilities of BWay Pro 5.0. Doesn't make much sense to me because it apparently will still capture at 352x240, and then you can convert that MPEG2. I don't see the value in this as DVD MPEG 2 is 702x480. Why would one want to transcode 352x240 to 704x480 and then convert to MPEG2? Seems to me that it would not be any clearer than the original 352x240 AVI. Is this brain-dead or what? I was hoping that 5.0 would capture at a higher resolution so that I could use it to make SVCDs. I have already tried converting 352x240 AVI to 480x480 MPEG2 for SVCD and thought the original 352x240 VCD MPEG1 looked better.

BWay Pro is the best bet for VCD2.0 IMO.

Kevin

-- Kevin (kevin@kevcat.com), November 06, 2000.

Please clarify something for me. I bought the Broadway card because it is a hardware assisted encoder, which means it can encode in real time, so that I could convert VHS tapes to Video CD. Aren't the VHS tapes recorded at 352x240 resolution? Would you get better quality capturing a video at a higher resolution when the tape is at the 352x240? It seems to me that even if you could capture at the resolution that DVD uses that it would be pointless use it on a tape that was at a lower resolution. Am I wrong about this?

-- Al McCraw (amccraw@ix.netcom.com), November 08, 2000.

I don't know the resolution at which VHS is delivered. But it makes sense that if it is at 352x240, then capturing at a higher resolution may not buy you much in terms of quality. I seem to recall somewhere that VHS resolution is actually higher than 352x240. Also, seems to me that MPEG-2 should look better as it has less blockiness than MPEG- 1 at a given resolution... Comments?

Kevin

-- kevin (kevin@kevcat.com), November 09, 2000.

Follow-up: According to the FAQ at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2496/vcdfaq.html

VHS resolution is about 300x360...

Kevin

-- kevin (kevin@kevcat.com), November 09, 2000.

...and DVD resolution is CCIR601 resolution which is 720x480/576, NOT 704x... 704x480/576 is part of CIF resolution family.

-- MT (turk690@yahoo.com), November 12, 2000.