Recommended Analog/RCA Capture Device?

astrovideo · Post by **astrovideo** » Fri Aug 17, 2007 4:05 pm

Can anyone recommend an analog/RCA capture device that is already known to work with VS10? I'd like to use it for transfering VHS tapes to the computer.

Thank you.

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Fri Aug 17, 2007 4:21 pm

Do you have a DV camcorder that has pass-thru capabilities?

astrovideo · Post by **astrovideo** » Fri Aug 17, 2007 4:37 pm

No I don't. I have the Panasonic PV-GS320.

DB83 · Post by **DB83** » Fri Aug 17, 2007 5:01 pm

What part of the world are you from ?

I've just acquired a Hauppauge WinTV Express (PAL) and it works a treat using RCA for the video connection (composite)

This is a PCI device and requires a graphics card that supports direct draw. The spec said pci or agp but mine is pci-e and it still works.

The audio is routed to the soundcard and if you have 2 RCA connectors you will need an adapter cable - rca female | 3.5 mm jack - got one of those from ebay.

I think the Hauppage WinTV Go is a similar model for NTSC.

But read my reply to your other topic first

skier-hughes · Post by **skier-hughes** » Fri Aug 17, 2007 5:25 pm

Check out teh canopus advc range of products, which connect to the pc via firewire, allowing you to use whichever editing ap you want and you can capture as dv.avi.

DVDDoug · Post by **DVDDoug** » Fri Aug 17, 2007 6:23 pm

Some capture device manufacturers:

ATI The ATI All-InWonder boards seem to be the most popular.
Hauppauge I have a Hauppauge card.
Pinnacle Pinnacle's software competes with Corel/Ulead

- Most of the PCI capture devices have built-in TV tuners so you can use your computer as a DVR/TiVo.

- Most USB capture devices are MPEG, since USB-2 is not fast enough for real time DV-formatted video. (See MPEG coments below!)

- Avoid the cheap capture devices. Analog capture is tricky, and lots of people have trouble with the hardware & software.

- Once you buy a capture device, use the capture-software that came with it. Some capture-software and capture-hardware just don't "play well together". Once you have a digital file on your hard drive, you can use the video editing and DVD authoring software of your choice.

- Commercial VHS movies are copy-protected with Macrovision. A MiniDV camcorder used in pass-thru mode will detect the Macrovision signal and prevent copying. Some capture devices will ignore the copy protection and copy anyway.

For more information on video capture:
DigitalFAQ.com
VideoHelp.com

I have a Hauppauge PCI card, and it has one major flaw. It only captures only to MPEG.

MPEGs can be "difficult" to edit, and I ended-up buying a special-purpose MPEG editor. (My signature/tag-line below was inspired by one of the problems.)

Even with a special-purpose MPEG editor, the nature of MPEG compression requires the video to be decompressed before any "real editing" can be done. The video has to be re-compressed after editing. Since MPEG is lossy compression, you loose some quality with the 2nd encode. You can "cut & splice" without re-coding, but transitions, color adjustments, cropping, title overlays, etc., will all require the extra encode/re-code cycle.

There are some advantages to the Hauppauge hardware MPEG encoder. It puts a very light-load on the computer. You are sending pre-compressed data to the hard drive, and the CPU doesn't have to do any "work". And since the data is compressed, there is less data traveling over the data bus. This means you don't need a fast computer and you might get-away with multitasking during capture... But I don't touch the computer while it's capturing real-time video.

And when you make a DVD, the video is already in the correct MPEG-2 format, so the process goes faster.