TV Capture Cards

Now I know this has been asked many times, but what capture card would you recommend? I'm looking to take VHS material and save them as digital files and burn them to DVD.

I saw this card (Win TV Express) in Maplin for a reasonable price (£26) and wondered if it would do the job I wanted it for.

Any ideas?

Persoanally I would recommend one with a hardware encoder, such as the WinTV PVR-130. However, if you have a powerful pc, that should be fine.

what would be the best capture card to capture say a satellite tv picture, I also have a technomate which has a yellow video out socket but the sky box only has a scart.

As far as I'm aware, there are no TV Card that can accept SCART input for the simple reason that SCART is bigger than a PCI slot. The best connection to use is S-Video, however, if you don't have a Sky+ box, you will have to buy a (powered) RGB SCART to S-Video convertor, and they don't come cheap. Otherwise, use the yellow cable composite input, it suffers from Dot Crawl, but is still better than RF.

Thanks Orry Verducci, i'll use the Technomate then and give it a try.

I highly recommend the "Leadtek WinFast DTV2000" its a Freeview and Terrestrial tuner with great resolution captures etc, if you've seen some of mine in other threads you'll know and its very cheap to, around £40 when I got it. Its PCI and comes with a remote too. You can't go wrong.

Despite Hauppauge being slapped with a lot of 'first name in capture cards' rhetoric, they always seem to be rather turdy in the end. The last USB analogue thing I got was a complete mess, and even their DTT cards have these vile IE-based interfaces that crap out at every opportunity, so whilst I can't actually recommend anything (though the above seem to have the right idea ) I can at least say Hauppauge smells. That was incisive.

Hauppauge was my first TV card and after getting an AverMedia with my new PC a couple of years ago, I went back to Hauppauge this week with it's HVR1300 - the one with the MPEG decoder on the hardware.

The AverMedia was very susceptible to crashing or dropping lots of frames to the point where I'd record without displaying the TV picture and with no other programs running. At least with the 1300 there's no frame loss and I can still watch the picture full screen.

Only issue I've noticed is with Media Center where the Freeview picture is too far down so it's showing lots of black at the top and losing a lot of the bottom. Any ideas what the problem may be?

Also, is there a way in Media Center to bypass the "you need an IR blaster" setup page so I can record from my S-Video slot?

Cheers, Asa

I don't think there is, I've been trying to do the same with my HVR-1300 for ages.

I do have to say that the software used by the Hauppauge cards is getting a little dated, so pointed out to them many times over on the Hauppauge UK forums. However, the cards themselves are very reliable with high quality picture. All recordings I make with it are full TV resolution without any frames dropping, and as I use S-Video with the recording set to a high bitrate, the playback of recordings is extremely good quality. I haven't had the chance to test it with Freeview yet as my aerial and coax needs totally replacing, however, from what I have seen, it directly records the transport stream, and therefore what is played back is exactly what is broadcast. The only shame with the newer cards is that they now (as Microsoft recommends) use BDA drivers, which is perfect for DVB and has many applications that support it, but when it comes to Analogue, many programmes are designed for the older drivers, and therefore either don't work at all or have no audio. It's not a major problem however.