Hi Guys, I have a bt878 chipset capture card (pctv).My system is a p4 2.4 533Mhz bus with 1 gig of ram,2 x 7200 ata hard drives,nvidea gforce 4 64meg video and onboard sound (Intel Board,Xp Pro....etc. I have had almost no sucess in capturing from my Analog camcorder or vcr. I have no problems from dvd player or capturing direct from my camcorder, if its not recorded to tape and had limited sucess from a friends Dv camcorder. It appears that most people play their vcr etc straight through the Dv camcorder to a firewire port (which my board doesn't have). My question: Is there a sucessful way to capture without a Dv camcorder using this or another capture card? I have read about video enhancers-I found a kit one for around $100.00 -has anyone had sucess using one of these or should the money be put to something else? Cheers dZak
I been using IUVCR for capturing software,,i just ripped a video of mine from 1984 with no dropped frames or sync issues,with huffy codec at 720-480 res
catdaddio, I see your kworld capture card uses a Conexant CX23883-19 chipset. How does this compare with a Conexant bt878 chipset in performance? I have tried virtualdub and virtual vcr amongst other software and also generic drivers (which locked up virtual dub and I had to use amcap)
I used to own a BT878A Chipset TV Card(ATI TV Wonder) and I had no problems with dropping frames at all... What Codec do you Capture with?? I find that HuffYUV or PicVideo Mjpeg are the best for Analogue Capture... I suspect the Problem is more to do with your Video source than your TV Card or PC...If your Video Source has Bad Frames in it your TV Card could drop those frames, as you seem to capture OK when useing other Video sources..... You might as a Last resort try to Copy the Camcorder Tape to VHS and then capture the VHS tape with your TV Card..Or if you knew someone who had something like a Canopus ADVC-100 then that would Probably work cuz it has an audio Lock feature that makes it so the audio and Video can not go out of Sync even if you dropped frames..... I now have a Simple $40 Card with a 10 Bit Conexant CX23883 Chipset and it captures quite a Bit better quality than the BT878A Did and haven"t dropped a Frame yet.... Cheers
Hi minion, I capture using uncompressed avi and don't recompress till after I have eddited (or thats the plan if i could get reliable capture). I have just picked up a pci firewire card and will try the vhs & vhsc through a friends DV camcorder on the weekend. As for going straight from vhs it drops frames just as bad as the camcorder even on a recently recorded tv show to a new tape (its also a new vcr). You say the cx23883-19 is a better quality chipset than the bt878 but you didn't have any frame dropping with the 878 either, so i don't know why mine is falling down?
Well Captureing to Uncompressed AVI needs an extremely Fast hard drive because at full resolution uncompressed AVI sucks up about 1.2gb per minute and if your Drive isn"t fast enough to write that much data to the Drive you will drop Frames... I suggest you try the "HuffYUV" lossless codec for Captureing ...It produces the same quality as Uncompressed AVI but uses Half the Disk Space and since it is a Lossless codec you can edit and render Useing the HuffYUV codec Multiple Times without any Loss of Quality... It is well Known for being the Best AVI Capture codec because of the Fact it is Lossless and it is also a Freeware codec which you can easilly find doing a Google search.... Cheers
I have just borrowed a sony dv camcorder and captured through the firewire port, a dv tape at around 720 x 576 uncompressed without dropping any frames. Unfortunately it doesn't support AV-DV conversion so I couldn't try a vhs tape etc. This would definately show the problem is not in the hard drive data transfer but more so in the input video or capture card. I will try to borrow another camcorder and hopefully be able to try vhs through it. I was also getting a bit of noise (snow) in the picture with them 878 and the firewire has solved this, so it think this will be the way to go. I have just installed Huffyuv so i will give it a try with the vhs through the 878 next to see if it improves. Thanks for your help so far.
Camcorders do not capture in uncompressed AVI format...They capture to DV AVI which is about 1/5th the Size of Uncompressed AVI files.... Captureing From a Camcorder Via Firewire isn"t really Captureing because it is a lossless transfer of the Data on the DV Tape to your Hard drive so it is More Like Copying a file to your Hard drive as opposed to captureing Video so you generally will not Drop frames..... Cheers
That's interesting, What format does the Canopus ADVC-100 convert analog signals to? Does it also transfer via firewire to the PC?
The ADVC-100 Converts Analoge Signals to DV AVI format and Transfers the Video to your Hard drive Via Firewire Port...It uses an audio lock technoligy that gaurantees Audio and Video Sync even with dropped Frames.....
