Capture Card Help

[Whipped]

Ok, I'm after a cheap capture card that I can use to start encoding the 200+ VHS videos I own, onto my PC.

From there I'll convert them down to DivX or Xvid and dump 5 or 6 at a time onto a DVDr.

Can anyone recommend a good, cheap card that will do this. Ideally I think I'd like one that I could put a scart lead into, or that at least had seperate video and audio RCA jacks. However, I'm thinking those are going to be really expensive and I may have to resort to copying the films over using standard composite.

Any help appriciated.

Ta.

 

[Whipped]

Just a little update on this. I did a little research and ended up getting a one of these cheap little Pinnacle PCTV Rave Cards.

Am Using Cyberlink's PowerVCR to Capture Video from my VCR (Via composite) and my onboard sound card to grab the audio at the same time. (Be easier if my VCR had an S-Video out )

After capture I just encode with DivX using good old VirtualDub and pass it through a couple of filters to clean the image up a little. The audio can lose sync sometimes, but that's easily fixed by resampling within Soundforge.

All in all my VHS collection is slowly getting backed up onto DVDrs and I'm very pleased with the results.

Just thought I'd add my success in case anyone else is looking down this road in the future.

 

[sibanac]

whipped, what vid card do you have ?
cant you just capture from the s/vid in on that ?

 

[Tom]

I bought a Fast AVmaster about 8 years ago to do some corporate videos on. It cost nearly a grand at the time. I saw one on Ebay last year, going for a quid with no bidders.

 

[phlash]

I got a Belkin USB 2.0 DVD Creator (http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProd...=&Section_Id=200433&pcount=&Product_Id=144533) about a year ago for a similar purpose.. cost me ~50 quid from Dabs... and I still haven't processed very much onto DVD/VCD yet

 

[Whipped]

I've only got a Radeon 8500. Perfect for TV-Out, but no way to get the TV to go in

I was tempted with one of the USB capture devices, but after trawling the videohelp.com forums it seemed that many people were having bad audio sync problems and were a bit annoyed that it only worked with the supplied software due to it encoding into a slighty modifyed MPEG2 format.

I've got the VHS->AVI process down to about 4 hours now for a 2 hour movie. 2 hours for the movie (duh!), about 10 mins to crop,resize,filter,etc., then about an hour and 10 mins to do two passes with the DivX codec, followed by 30 odd mins to get the audio sync right.