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Which TV Capture Card?


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Old 02-08-2003, 22:24
flashplanet
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I'm looking to get a TV Capture Card to capture stuff from the Thomson DTI1000's second SCART socket - sharing with my TV.
Can anybody recommend a good card either with the features below, or tell me if these are available on them (since a lot of websites like to be a bit vague about the technical details of things)
- Can it take SCART input?
- I'm not likely to do a lot of video capturing, but it still needs to have an acceptable quality.
- Do they often just let you watch full screen, or as a window whilst doing other stuff?
- Needs to be able to work well on a relatively low-powered computers. I'm assuming this shouldn't be too much of an issue if it's just taking the video from my DTT box as it's all rather...'passive'? Or is it....

As you can see, I'm not highly educated in capture cards, but I would like one. Thanks in advance for any advice
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Old 03-08-2003, 15:44
Jarrak
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This is a prettu good general site with video/audio information on capturing/conversion and writing to DVD, VCD etc.
Worth having a look..........DVDRHelp

If all you want is to watch TV on your PC via a capture card from a digital STB then PC's specs do not need to be high however if you intend to capture the video/audio stream then the PC requirments rise alarmingly
You need a nice fast HD with a lot of capacity, fast cpu to convert the incoming data into a variety of AVI or MPEG data and the more RAM the better. There are external capture devices which do the hard work and then just send the captured data to a PC for storage.
I've never seen an internal capture card with a scart socket only s-video, composite phono and RF so you may also have to look for some sort of adaptor.
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Old 03-08-2003, 17:50
kingdavera
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It depends what you mean by 'low-powered computers'. Most of the bog standard PCI cards will allow you to do quarter screen (320x200 ish) resolution captures OK, but you need a lot of disk space, and plenty of RAM helps. Capturing video can result in data streams measuring many megabytes per second. Needless to say, this adds up quickly.

The Hauppage cards are the most stable, and most complete of the lot. The USB devices work, but aren't best for capture. One of the £40-£50 devices will work fairly well though.
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Old 03-08-2003, 21:10
flashplanet
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Thanks for the link - using RF shouldn't prove to be a problem.
Since it will be mainly for capturing stills and watching it looks like I can get a pretty bog standard capture card, right?
Hauppage has been one of the names I've thought would probably be best to choose, so I'll look further into its lower-end cards.
EDIT: Why is it that none of the cards at http://www.hauppauge.com/html/chart.htm seem to support RF?
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Old 03-08-2003, 23:54
Jarrak
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Just a thought, why don't you consider a DTT card for your PC instead of connecting the DTT box to a capture card?
If not then a cheap capture card will do the trick, mine only cost me £55 and they are cheaper now.

The link you gave is to the US site which might explain the lack of a RF input since they are far more dependent upon cable and satellite delivery. The UK site has cards with RF inputs both plain capture cards and DTT cards.
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Old 04-08-2003, 01:31
flashplanet
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Well thanks for all your help and advice. I shall be purchasing the WinTV Primio card for about £40, and looks like it'll be great!
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