Leadtek WinFast TV2000 XP RM TV Tuner/Digital Recorder PCI Card??

[KRSESQ]

Anyone have any experience with this gizmo? The TV tuner in my old Marvel G400 appears to be dying and this is the only one I could find that supports AVI capture, and it's CHEAP. And being PCI, I can use it alongside a nice powerful AGP card.

(Don't entirely trust the capture or editing quality of MPEG-only capture cards.)

Kevin

[Marshmallowman]

Flyvideo make some reasonable cheap cards that can capture to AVI(uncompressed and mpeg4), though virtually any card can capture to avi with the right (third party) program.

What kind of chipset do you have, and do you use a raid chipset for capture?. I found out the hard way , going from an agp capture device to PCI puts a lot more stress on a crappy pci implementations.

[Nowhere]

This is the one with BT chip, that works with this soft?:

http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/

http://www.dscaler.org/

(sorry, no time to check)

If yes - thanks to excellent driver/software support (also on Linux...even better perhaps) they're actually quite nice...buying one myslef probably.

[az]

No TV card has any editing capability, it's all in the software. For the most widely used chipsets and tuners, there is good third party software available - a few years ago this was particularly true for analogue cards with BrookTree 8x8 chipsets.

Some digital TV systems natively broadcast in MPEG, BTW (DVB does), so a TV/capture card doesn't have to do any de- or encoding to record that to your HD. It just saves the signal to the harddisk, instead of sending it to your screen.

[Marshmallowman]

good point, if you get DVB-T , (free to air digital broadcast) there are quite a few nice cheap cards out there.
I use a twinhan DVB-t card, and the straight dump of the mpeg2 stream is excellent quality. Just trim the adverts and dump the stream onto a DVD, admittedly recompressing to mpeg4 would probably save quite a bit of space. But the convience of just dumping the stream which quite conviently fits 2 hours of video onto a single sided disk is a nice convient size to fit a movie or 4x 30 minute episodes with no recompression hassles. (yes I am lazy)

[Kooldino]

I had that card. Good card for the money, works fine for viewing tv, lousy at capturing.

[Dr Mordrid]

The ATI All in Wonder is a good display, TV and capture card and you can capture every which way with it. It's TV out is a bit rudimentary compared to the newer Matrox cards, but it's far more than serviceable.

Get one of the newer X1000 based cards (including the AIW) and you can use their XCODE package, now called the Avivo Video Encoder. It feeds media encodes thorugh the X1000 GPU's programmable pixel shaders for 5x faster encoding. This German site has a download link for it;

http://www.chip.de/downloads/c1_downloads_18000750.html

Dr. Mordrid

[Nowhere]

Kooldino, I'm curious - in what way it is lousy at recording?