USB Video Capture Devices

demonofaj · Post by **demonofaj** » Sat Mar 31, 2007 10:12 am

Can anybody recommend an awesome USB Video Capture Device at a reasonable price (less than 70) that's good and doesn't lock up your comp (as I've read) or make GARGANTUAN output files.

Basically it's to just capture things off of a HI-8 Video Camera, and then burn it on a DVD of some sort...thanks in advance.

Post by **Sparkfist** » Sat Mar 31, 2007 6:40 pm

Pinnacle makes some nice mid-range USB capture cards. Look for Dazzle, those are some good models. Otherwise I would suggest going to Best Buy or Circuit City (Micro Center if ones near by) and just look at the options they have and the prices.

As for keeping your system from locking up. Be sure you have at least 512MB ram, more would be highly suggested. A good 2GHz or faster CPU is another good piece of hardware to have. Video is going to be very demanding and you'll want the system to have these kind of specs to have the least number of dropped frames.

And not to rain on your parade, but a desktop with a built-in capture card is far superior. Much faster, less system memory used, and generally better compression (more verity).

timmeh87 · Post by **timmeh87** » Sat Mar 31, 2007 8:46 pm

I remember dazzle. Cost like $300 at the time and never actually worked on my computer...

of course I was also running windowsME at the time...

Is there a reason why it cant be a PCI card?

Post by **bicostp** » Sat Mar 31, 2007 9:19 pm

Of course you're going to have GARGANTUAN files. I burned an old Christmas special we taped to a DVD last year and the full-size MPEG-2 was about 2 gigabytes for an hour. You don't want to have small files when you're re-mastering something. (Which is what I assume you're trying to do: preserve home movies.)

I've seen "Video to DVD" kits on the shelf at Target for about $50. They come with a USB adapter, but they just have video inputs so if your camera only outputs RF you'll need to convert it with a VCR or something.

Really a PCI card will give you better performance because it's more likely to have encoding hardware. Mine's a TV Wonder VE; bought it at Best Buy for 10 dollars a few years ago. It's nothing special (a mroe expensive card will probably yeild cleaner images with less overscan), but it gets the job done.

Post by **Sparkfist** » Sun Apr 01, 2007 6:22 am

Bicostp, 2GB for an hour is not bad at all, that's great, that's DVD quality right there. You can go beyond standard DVD quality MPEG-2, where 30 minutes of video is nearly 1GB, that's insane.

As for Dazzle, yes they have come down in price, yes using Windows ME did have a big effect on how it performed, before the NT systems PnP was Plug 'n Pray. And the reason quality back then sucked was you're using USB 1.1 with a maximum transfer speed of 1.5MB/s.

Well USB 2.0 is very useful and I'm sure Firewire is the same way, PCI or in my case an AGP card would be far better. My system was a P4 2.26GHz, 256MB ram, ATI Radeon 9000 All-in-Wonder. I had <1 frame dropped per second/minute when I recorded any video. And this setup is ancient compared to what you could do now, so I'd say this should be your base level, at least meet these specs.

P.S. A Radeon 9000 AiW should only run you like $50 on ebay, give or take $10.

demonofaj · Post by **demonofaj** » Sun Apr 01, 2007 9:16 am

Ugh, I can't believe I can't find some good RAM upgrades for a Dell, lol, but I guess Pinnacle is the way to go.

Post by **bicostp** » Sun Apr 01, 2007 9:54 am

"Good RAM upgrades for a Dell"?

You sound like Dell is a bizzare, proprietary manufacturer. (Well, some things are proprietary... RAM isn't.)

Look your machine up at www.kahlon.com to see what it takes. (If it's an Optiplex or Dimension it probably takes regular DDR2. If you bought a PowerEdge for some reason you'll have to spring for RIMMS.)

Harshboy · Post by **Harshboy** » Sun Apr 01, 2007 10:33 am

If its about 5-7 years old, it could possibly be RDRAM. My friend has RDRAM and it costs a lot of money to buy (To buy 1 GB of Ram, it can cost like $500-700 he said)

Post by **Sparkfist** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 6:21 am

Harshboy wrote:If its about 5-7 years old, it could possibly be RDRAM. My friend has RDRAM and it costs a lot of money to buy (To buy 1 GB of Ram, it can cost like $500-700 he said)

Even up to 4 years ago. I have a Gateway that's the same way. 256MB is about $100, so yes it's insanely expensive, for stuff that isn't even as good as DDR2.

I know this sounds like I'm a salesman, but try looking at Memory Giant. I got some RAM from them for my zv6123cl HP laptop. The ram I needed is a specific chip set and they had a good price. I bough through ebay. They should have what you need.