i am using snazzi videdo maker, past two years... now i want an upgrade...please suggest me a best and economical standalone card

-- ahad (ahad_ma@hotmail.com), August 21, 2002

Answers

The low cost is Hauppauge WinTV PCI. There are four models of this kind, the last two models have S-Video input which give you better quality than composite (I prefer model 401). These cards do not have hardware MPEG, all data are captured and saved with MPEG software. You need a fast computer and big hard drives. Use VirtualDub or AVI_IO software to capture. These software give you more resolution to play with. If you have a slow computer, I suggest get a hardware MPEG capture card. The reasonable price in my budget is VisionTek Xtra everything. This card is an AGP video card built-in capture function and do an excellent job. Hope this help you get going, but do your own research.

Peter

-- Peter Tran (ptran3014@yahoo.com), August 24, 2002.

Dazzle's DVC II (Digital Video Creator II) is a terrific card. It does hardware encoding. It does sometimes have problems with AMD CPU systems and motherboards that share IRQs for PCI slots, but my PC has both of these things and the DVC II works on it. Just be warned that you can have problems with it. Some people never get it to work it seems. I'm not a big fan of software encoding as was also suggested. You'll get better results from hardware encoding on most PCs anyway. If you want to capture full frame DVD video at some point (720x480 NTSC or 720x576 PAL), you better have a 2 GHz or better CPU or you'll drop frames trying to do it. I don't even know if 2 GHz can do it, but I do know that 1 GHz is not powerful enough to do it.

-- Root (root@yahoo.com), August 26, 2002.