Comments

RBartlett wrote on 4/11/2003, 1:51 AM
Hauppauge WinTV basic tuner would IMHO, be better.
Captures uncompressed which needs about 27MB/sec sustained data rate, and an app that understands how to deal with the conexant 878 (or as per newer Hauppauge WinTV, the 10-bit comb filtered Cx23881). Less than a third of the price of the Hauppauge PVR-250 but you won't be paying for software MPEG-2 capture which is not upto Vegas export quality. If you don't want to store uncompressed 4:2:2 from SVIDEO, how about a Canopus ADVC-1394 to capture DV from analogue?

(leadtek WinTV2000XP is cheaper than the Tuner WinTV series, has solid WDM drivers without downloads, also has Ligos MPEG-2 and MPEG-1 realtime capture encoders that work beyond the DVD bitrate spec if required)

PVr-250, buys you a pod and the MPEG-2 but leaves you stuck in Hauppauge apps to use it, which is't the end of the world, but...

Adaptec have a hardware MPEG-2 capture device, if you are wanting something like a set top DVD recorder quality. USB2 I believe.
RixWare wrote on 4/11/2003, 2:59 AM
Thanks for the suggestions.

I'm already able to capture uncompressed DV by different means, so I'm looking specifically for hardware MPEG2 capabilities for PC (not a stand-alone unit). The reason for considering the WinTV PVR-250 is because of its real-time MPEG2 chip (not the TV portion, which I do not care about).

The cheaper WinTVs and the Leadtek appear to do only software encoding. In my experience, such capturing uses a buffer to store footage when the CPU can't keep up with the encoding. This means that the encoding isn't actually in real-time at all, and the CPU provides all the muscle. Is this not true for these cards? The Canopus looks like a great card, but with no MPEG.

I have read that it is possible to capture from the PVR-250 through SF Video Capture, which is what I hope to do. Is this incorrect?

I'm also looking for PCI or FireWire solutions, not USB (which has been a source of trouble with my system in the past).

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RBartlett wrote on 4/11/2003, 9:10 AM
USB can be a problem - I agree.
WinTV Go and LeadTek are software encoding only and require you to have a few hundred MHz CPU to operate (typically 550MHz for DVD MP@ML 8Mbps system streams). If you have a PIV 1.4GHz, or Athlon 1.2GHz with DDR or RDRAM then it'll be roughly equivalent of a consumer hardware/smart MPEG capture device, IMHO.

The results of realtime software encoding are realtime in my experience. You can go for a couple of hours, stop, and go again immediately. If you want 2-pass, this currently is adopted by capturing in a low compression mode, like DV, or MJPEG (or raw uncompressed) first. 2-pass might one day be available in hardware, working in numbers of GOP chunks, but until then, if you have the time, it is worth doing a CPU oriented encode.

The PVR-250 does have a custom MPEG encoder onboard. Not unlike the Dazzle DVC-II cards and USB2 devices. However these are not remarkable for motion estimation work IMHO.

I'd probably go for the PVR-250 if I was happy with all the software it comes with.
I'd be very surprised if SF Video Capture works with it _AND_ can pull back the MPEG data as an AVI or MPG file. Read away at this: http://www.aardvark.co.nz/pvr/pvr7.shtml

FireWire isn't uncompressed of course. 5:1 compression is the order of the day for consumer DV. It has no interframe compression, just intraframe. MPEG IBP can be edited. The PVR-250 and PVR-350 are reasonably priced.

If I had your mind to remove as much of the MPEG problem as possibly, I personally would look for a deal with something like the Philips 880 (UK has deals with equivalent of US$500) set top DVD recorder. Otherwise the forthcoming Polaroid DVD-DVR-700 WM9 CD recorder (US$299). Alternatively if I used a PC to acquire a video, I'd capture in the best format I could fit and use 2-pass VBR through TMPGEnc after slicing it up and other NLE things in Vegas.

If you get the PVR-250 and don't like it, it will probably sell quite easily on ebay! It is likely to be at the no-brainer price point for general consumption.

Good luck.
RixWare wrote on 4/11/2003, 10:28 AM
Thanks for the article link. It confirms my strategy. I already have the ability to work with DV and do extensive software encoding (through Vegas and Batch Converter) when necessary. I'm just trying to add a real-time solution that does not tie up my CPU for 4 to 7 hours per hour of source video. This will be used for projects which do not require any editing (of which I have a fair amount). Set top boxes are not an option. I am not purchasing for my own use, but for my clients.

My main question is about the quality of the hardware MPEG2 encoding of the PVR-250 versus, say, the Pinnacle DVC II (also on my short list of possible purchases). Certainly, multiple pass encoding is preferable, but I have found good reports on the single-pass hardware option found in both of these cards.

Can anyone confirm that the Hauppauge can be used as a capture device with SF Video Capture?

Thanks!

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