My New Toy

i had wanted a capture card for a while now. a capture card is simply a computer, pci device that allows you to output digital video or input digital video signals or s-video signals. and if that's too technical, then basically, it allows one to capture television, vcr, dvr, and other analog and digital signals off other appliances and devices. so, you could also plug your camcorder straight into this device and download your camcorder content straight into the computer.

the device name is Pinnacle (the company) Studio AV/DV version 9.xx. it's a pci device, very easy to install and came with Pinnacle's AV/DV studio software, which is the software that allows one to tap into the device and capture the stuff onto a harddrive, edit, and make new movies out of your captures.

the software had a couple bugs on the install and i had to bypass those parts, but otherwise the install went fairly smoothly. the interface is pretty intuitive and straight forward. all i had to do to get it going from here was to hook up an s-video cable from my DVR to the capture device. as soon as i started the software i could see the signal coming from my drv in a preview/view pane. to capture, i simply hit one button and stuff began to save to a drive (that i could designate, btw). to stop, just hit another button and everything's there waiting now to be editing if you wish.

that's as far i got last night. i didnt even hook up the audio yet and i didnt do any editing yet. but, it looks pretty straight forward.

jffe,

well, i wasnt real impressed when the software wouldnt install without bugs. it crashed several times before i deleted some things from the custom install. after that, it was ok.

as for lost frames and long videos, it tells me how much capacity my harddrive has in terms of bytes and time and it breaks up the captures in 'pages' and x number of mini-captures per page, so, so far i see nothing lost that i can detect.

well, i'll play with it more and see, jffe. i do recall they said something in the docs about losing frames and if that happened then you were supposed to go to a lower resolution. but anyways, we'll see. i'll get the audio hooked up and transfer some stuff around and play with it more.

there are other capture types. there were a couple in the store that used s-video and audio through a box that converted it to usb and you then just hooked the box to your usb port on the computer, but the guy in the store said the transfer quality was lower, so i opted for the best one they had, which was the pinnacle. other than the the couple of install bugs, so far it looks decent.

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Kraellin wrote: just some junk extracted from my dvr

----Why would you need to import or capture that ? Isn't it already digital, ie = just copy it over via usb or firewire ?
----I was doing a lot of old Vhs tape captures, and it was on whatever ancient pci card they gave ya for $99 3+ years ago, so most likely they improved that card, since I was using a decent P4 2400 witha gig of ram, and it was still dropping frames like it had just eaten a bucket of KFC chicken with no napkin, even at 320 X 240.

jffe