Best TV card for capturing game video?

[Cask]

Anyone recommend a TV Card to be used specifically for capturing footage of games from my S-Video out on a seperate PC? I imagine that I'm looking for a card that will have some decent compression options and maximum resolution/refresh frequency. Needs to be flexible regarding what editing software you can use, because I don't know which editor I'll use yet.

I've been shopping around all morning but not entirely sure what I should be looking for and at what price for the best quality video.

 

[babs]

The Hauppauge PVR 250 and 350 (iirc) both do hardware MPEG encoding, so that may be the sort of thing you're after.

 

[Cask]

PVR 250 looks perfect much better than the budget stuff I was looking at before, thanks matey.

 

[smurkin]

bought one recently, Haupage....very expensive & unless your system is shit -full-on hardware coding is prolly unnecessary.

So, I bought a leadtek winfast2000xp...iirc it was about 40 quid (overcockers uk)....cheap as chips & works a treat....it will do s-video...doesn't have onboard sound, so you'll need a soundcard to capture (unlike haupage)...it will code mpegs 1 & 2 streaming (and I think 4 - MPEG2 is about a meg per second on good quality, about 4 megs/s on best). The bundled software (sonic MyDVD) works with my DVD burner for making DVDs. It does pause / rewind realtime & all that crap, has a radio tuner, has some feature for downloading tv program schedules for remote recording (a years free subs to the service...dont work with sky)....for the money, its purty good

 

[NaveT]

PVR250 if you are just encoding.
If you want decoding and tv out go for the PVR350.

I have the PVR350 as my PVR now. (Think Tivo / Skyplus) using mythTV as the software - http://www.mythtv.org/modules.php?name=MythFeatures

Recording TV remotely etc...very nice.