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TV Tuner and TV Capture
schi0249 - Nov 19, 2003
 schi0249 Nov 19, 2003
I have an nforce 2 based system with a Geforce graphics card. I'm looking to add a capture and or tuner card to add. I tried the ATI TV Wonder VE, but it doesn't appear to work with my system. I want to pull video off of VCR tapes and burn it to DVD. Having a TV tuner would be a plus, but is not required.

 racketboy Nov 19, 2003
WinTV cards are pretty popular and cand be found for a decent price on eBay.

 dnguyen800 Nov 19, 2003
go to tv-cards... for information about different TV tuners. I would recommend getting one that can capture videos in MPEG2. Cheap ones like Hauppauge WinTV Go (which I have) aren't very good at recording at all. Their software doesn't even have simple features like timed recordings and it gives me a BSOD occasionally. I've yet to find a decent program that can record tv shows without dropping any frames.

 Mask of Destiny Nov 19, 2003
My experiences with a WinTV card have been less than stellar, of course then again I had a crappy VIA MVP3 based motherboard. I had an ATI TV wonder and it worked all right, but it wasn't great. My best experience so far has been with my All-inWonder Radeon, but that's not really appropriate given that you already have a video card.

You might want to consider a firewire solution.

 racketboy Nov 19, 2003
to be honest, I don't think there is such thing as a great TV tuner card

 Curtis Nov 19, 2003
The WinTV PVR 250 is supposed to be quite good. It's also one of the more expensive ones, I think. There are also a number of digital TV tuner cards out there these days - maybe you should look into one of these?

 schi0249 Nov 19, 2003
All I am mainly looking for is something to pull video from my VCR. I have both firewire and USB. Are there any devices other than Video Capture cards I could use?

 dnguyen800 Nov 20, 2003
I don't know man, good video capture devices cost as much as or more than good TV tuner cards. Definitely do not get a usb 1.1 tv tuner or capture, the quality is worser than a cheap pci one. You can get a cheap tv tuner like WinTV Go if you want, the recording quality is not bad at 320x240. You just have to put more effort into installing drivers which was a real pain in the ass for me. How much are you willing to spend?