Need Advice

[Vakas]

Hi! I'm looking to buy a capture card that will hook up to my analogue camcorder and will to spend about £50.

Can you guys advice me on something in this price range which can do the job or prefrably a TV Tuner that has anoglogue connctors on it.

Thanks

[Jeff the Brit]

The basic Hauppauge TV cards are fine if you only want to transfer short video clips. I have a very old one which will only record video as AVI, which limits you for recording time, something like 40 minutes in the maximum 2gb file size. I think the newer ones will do MPEG in software though.
For just under £80 ( at Dixons, of all places!) you can get the Hauppauge PVR 150, which has built-in hardware MPEG compression. Much better for long recordings. I've installed a couple of these for folks who wanted to transfer video tape collections to CD/DVD.

[NooNoo]

ATI do a nice range as well - the all in wonder. Tuners will probably take you over budget, you can get vivo cards (video in/video out) quite cheaply though. The thing to check first is what output is your analogue camcorder...svideo? composite? Identify that then get a vivo card with the same input as the camcorder outputs then you avoid signal loss through conversion.

[Vakas]

Tanks I'll look into that and keep you posted.

[confus-ed]

Cheap Tv cards capable of capturing analogue TV can be had from £20 or so, many places, I dunno where Jeff is paying £80 ! - you are getting done mate !

Personally I'm very taken with these at the minute :- AVerTV DVB-T 771 which are actually a digital TV card, but also have AV & svideo connections, so you could easily capture stuff from your camcorder, or your vcr or wherever (even watch terrestial tv I suppose with a vcr acting as the tuner).

& all within your budget - bonus !

[Jeff the Brit]

Confus-ed, I do get the cheapo cards for 20 quid or so. The PVR150 is the bottom one of Hauppauge's posh range. Another good one I've seen lately is from Nebula. I've installed this for a friend and it looks damn good on a 20 inch Dell widescreen LCD. Built-in Freeview channels as well. Not cheap, but quality kit. The software package seems more stable than the Hauppauge WinTV app which is one of the few things that is able to BSOD my 2k box.

[confus-ed]

The PVR150 is the bottom one of Hauppauge's posh range..

Sorry still locked onto "basic Hauppauge" when reading .

[slgrieb]

There are several decent USB capture devices (from Adaptec, Pinnacle, and others) that would fit the bill, but I hesitate to get too specific, since I'm not sure what is available on your side of the pond. Check PC World, CNet, PC Mag, etc. for reviews.

Depending on the vintage of your video card, you may find a better one with video capture is in your price range and you could get better 3D and video capture in one shot. nVidia and ATI based cards both support video capture. MSI, Sapphire, Asus, EVGA, are all good brands.