I Would like to record for example programs onto my Pc, but what kind of card does I need, and how expensive is it??


Yours truly


bono_head

You need a video capture card.
Cost, well how much do you want to spend?. There are basic video capture cards, 3D cards incorporating video capture - right up to the super expensive professional cards.
Check your local PC shop for prices.

need a video capture card like from ATI all in wonder
or capture card on its own

Thanks alot for the tips. I`ve checked it out, and in my online store, I can`t find anything that remotely looks like a capture card. Any good advice?

Yours truly....

bono_head

Heres a list here

http://www.vcdhelp.com/capturecards.php

I have a Pinnacle Studio PCTV Pro which I bought for about £50.

Its OK for watching TV but the recording quality is not that good unless you use the highest settings which need alot of disc space. I wanted to be able to capture at VCD quality Mpeg directly but found the quality not good enough. I have to capture as AVI and then convert to mpeg to get the best quality. Audio not that good but this may be due to my onboard sound??

Most cards work in the same way but you may get better quality the faster your processor is (mine is an 800 Duron)

All try searching for capture card here and see what you get! - http://www.google.co.uk/

For a good allrounder the Hercules All in Wonder 7500 Radeon is very good. If you can afford it, the 8500 is even better.....

I`ll check it out and see what I kind find. It would be nice to get a decent card so I can record with my computer instead of the hideous VHS machine, with gigantic tapes. I don`t have that much space at my place!

Thanx for the tip!


yours truly

bono_head

Pinnacle Studio PCTV TV-Tuner is what I found at a price of approx 65 pounds. Is it worth it? Does anyone have any experience with it? What kind of formats can I record in? Can I record for example a movie? How much space will it take on my harddrive. Can I compress it down to DivX format? Is it something called DivX?

A lot of questions early in the morning. Hopefully a lot of answers.


Yours truly


bono_head

these guys (http://www.vnunet.com/Products/Hardware/1102914) think it's alright, check out some reviews of other cards while you are there.

The problem with the All In Wonder cards are that you need a fair amount of processing power to do the compression - the card doesn't do it in hardware itself, but offloads it to the CPU.

A good solution for you, perhaps would be to record in MPEG2 (like DVD) as you would get good quality to watch back. However, with an AIW, that would mean you would need at least a 700MHz PC and have it not doing anything else while it's recording.

Don't forget, too, that you need to be able to put out back to the TV, so your video card needs TV out on it (the AIWs are good in this respect as they are a video card, along with the capture card, and can do TV out).

Cheers,
Rolf.