Recommend a good yet inexpensive capture card for analog capture?

[Hulk]

I'm currently using an ATI AIW 128 16MB video card for capture. I don't really capture using the MPEG modes. I either use the PICVideo MJPEG capture with a low compression ratio or huffyuv lossless capture.

Could someone recommend a good card for this type of capture? I guess it just needs to do yuv in order to capture huffyuv and PicVideo MJPEG but I'm not an expert and am therefore not sure.

I do think the captures using the ATI card are pretty good but a few people in this forum have criticized the low quality Brooktree (I think) electronics in this card. I'd like to move up to something with a little higher quality. I'm also going to build a video editing system for my sister so she'll need a capture card as well. Here video camera is analog so DV support is not necessary.

I'm thinking about building her a system based on the 815e motherboard and using the integrated video with a additional capture card to save money. She doesn't play 3D games. On the other hand the recent price drops in the Thunderbird processor have made them look pretty irresistable.

What specifically are the electronics portion of an analog capture card that make it capable of high quality capture?

Thanks for any advice and suggestions,

Mark

[Eric VanHeest]

Brooktree criticism notwithstanding, the $40 (more or less depending on where you shop) WinTV "Go" card should be sufficiently inexpensive to let you try it and determine its quality for yourself. It does zero processing on the input signal, so if YUY2 is what you're after, that's exactly what you get. Of course, if you're looking for an integrated video+capture on the same card, your choices are more limited. I've had excellent results with uncompressed video on the WinTV cards (with line-in captures; I can't get very good quality out of their TV tuners, but since I don't use that, it doesn't matter to me). If you want to use S-Video, you'll have to use the $150 WinTV "Theater" cards, which are sufficiently expensive that there are probably reasonable alternatives (although I don't know of any others at that range that accept S-Video input).

I would advise you to find someplace with a good return policy and try several cards until you find one that works well; I've only tried Matrox, ATI, and Hauppauge cards (as well as a couple random nVidia+capture cards, which were generally useless as they had no NT drivers). I like the Hauppauge best for several reasons, but mostly the NT4 native YUY2 support, unobtrusive drivers, and very good price.

[Greebe]

The WinTV dbx stereo/FM stereo (#401) sells for $100 at CompUSA. It has composite and Svideo in and a IR remote. Not a bad card... but leaves abit to be desired. I have one and use the svideo in with my Hi8.

[Eric VanHeest]

Just out of pure curiosity, what do you look for in a capture board that the WinTV doesn't have (assuming you're not looking for on-board compression)?

Granted, something that did HuffYUV-type onboard compression would be a big hit