ADVC100 questions

way2slo wrote on 9/17/2003, 9:20 AM

hi all
i have the cash for the canopus advc100, before i order it, i have a few questions.
1. does it still have problem with xp pro sp1? i heard it doesnt work properly under windows xp a few months back, is the problem solved?
2. i know some firewire card doesnt work well with advc100, i couldnt find any info on their web. i have a adaptec 4300 firewire card, am i ok?
3. lets say i want to capture video from vhs tape via advc100 and make a dvd later, am i getting the same screen revolution from the vhs output? or the advc100 will resize it to avi or mpeg during the transfer?
thanks in advance

Comments

vitalforce2 wrote on 9/17/2003, 10:24 AM

I bought an ADVC100 recently and researched the same issues. Let's see how good my memory is now.

1. I believe the reported problems with the XP-SP1 patch involved the ADVC internal PCI cards, not the 100 which is an exterior box. In any event, their forum said that a patch is now available (for the PCI card).

2. I have seen comments that the Texas Instruments chip on various brand name cards has some odd incompatibilities with the ADVC100. The 100 was a cooperative project between Canopus and NEC, so it uses NEC electronics. Thus, firewire cards with NEC chips instead of the TI (Texas Instruments) chips are said to work fine. Pyro, for instance, is TI and OrangeMicro is NEC. I have both cards in two PCI slots (the Pyro came with a software bundle I wanted), so my 100 is plugged into the OrangeMicro port and seems to work fine. I use that card for input, then, and the Pyro card for output to an external drive, which keeps the two functions on separate IRQs.

Being a little obsessive, I searched the Adaptec site for your 4300 card and found that it does indeed have a TI chipset. One way to protect against possible problems then, is to consider spending about $25 for an OrangeMicro 3-port card (which I bought) if you have a spare PCI port.

3. If I understand this question right, the ADVC will give you excellent hardware-transcoding of analog video to the universal avi-DV format with 48Khz, 16-bit stereo audio (locked to the video signal) in the standard DV aspect ratio (for NTSC) of 720 x 480, which it also will output in the same size and ratio. The sales pitch is that this is the only box in this price range that will do that. It is also switchable to PAL from NTSC. It will not transcode to MPEG.

In any event, I was so impressed with the picture quality and signal stability of the 100 box, which I had to buy when my old Hollywood DV converter box died, that I am now recapturing my daughter's wedding video which I was about to put on DVD and send around to the family. (I briefly tried the competing Pyro box but was not impressed). Just my opinion, but I don't think you can buy a better DV converter below $1000.

way2slo wrote on 9/17/2003, 11:56 AM

thanks so much
you answered my questions :)

r56 wrote on 9/17/2003, 1:45 PM

Yeap works great!
editor3333 said it all.
Just a comment, the compatibility issue can occur only with some older cards that used a specific TI chip. From what I know the problem has been solved (from the TI part) and there shouldn't be any problem with recent Texas Instrument based cards.