In the interest of stimulating some interesting and useful discussion, I'm asking for input on Chipsets used on capture cards/devices.

I've noticed that when someone new to the forum wants to know the merits of certain cards, cost vs quality vs features, the discussion usually boils down to "the card I own is best"! Since many of these cards are based on a limited number of manufactured chip sets, this sort of inquiry could be useful. My personal interest is getting the biggest bang for the buck.

My own card, the ATI Wonder, PCI add-on, is based on the Brooktree chipset. I'll have to get the exact chipset id off of the card. I believe that Haupt uses the same. Would one of the proud owners of a Dazzel, take a peek.

Any takers?

-- me (snake_mountain@hotmail.com), March 05, 2001

Answers

The Hauppauge PVR uses the Kfir mpeg encoder chip. However, I just returned my card, because it would "stall" while recording after a random 1-20 minutes. I tried all the upgrade downloads, tricks and 3 different computers. Always the same. It worked great otherwise.

-- Jim Edrington (edringtj@austin.ibm.com), March 07, 2001.

I finally got my PC upgrade active, MB Chaintech 6BTM -> Abit SH6 (i815e chipset), memory 128M(Unnamed PC66) -> 256M(Named PC133), Processor Celeron 266 -> P3 850e, HD non-ATA -> ATA-100.

My ATI Wonder still hangs intermittently capturing MPG1 using ATI Software. I can't blame the underlying computer hardware anymore. I can't blame the capture card either since ATI's capture software is of pretty poor quality.

I can now capture 480x480 using DivX codec(high compression, CPU intensive) with out any problems, using Virtual Dub Software. I hope to experiment with 720x480 captures using a variety of codecs this weekend (DivX, MJPEG, ASF, etc.).

-- me (snake_mountain@hotmail.com), March 08, 2001.

i'm using optibase moviemaker 200 .direct vcd capturing very very good.

-- lion (lion@lion.com), March 08, 2001.