is this a bad product

[neversleep]

Hi

I don't know that much about computers and I would need an advice. Since i've have a quite limited budget I'm looking for the cheapest alternative possible to get my old family vhs over to dvd. My graphics card doesn't have video-in and investing in one that does seems to be a expencive deal.

I wonder about this product:

http://www.jetway.com.tw/evisn/product/lcd-tv/tv-878m.htm

Would this product help me get the vhs into my computer? Will it be lower quality than other simular products since there seem to be quite a difference in price between this an for instance a product like Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250? What are the downsides with jetways product?

Thanks for any advice. and sorry about the poor english

[sfheath]

Hi Neversleep, the Jetway sounds good.

Two points I think need considering. It doesn't specify a hardware encoder whereas I know the Hauppauge unit has one. This will relieve some of the processor burden, allowing you to maybe do some other non-file-accessing tasks. You don't specify your PC processor. If it's much under 2GHz (others may dispute that number) then the help from hardware encoding will be required.

Second point is the Hauppauge includes a TV tuner and timed recording software whereas the Jetway needs a daughterboard add-on.

I hope this is of help.

[neversleep]

yes it is..

well it didn't work for me anywho.. After a weekend of swearing and screaming i went back to the store today and got me another card.
My computer (with windows XP) gave me four or five "blue screens of death", the sound kept on disapearing after a couple of seconds and half of the chanels refused to give me colour.

I didnt find any drivers for XP anywhere so I guess that could be the problem. The card itself seemed to be quite allright.


Thanks sfheath for your reply. I conscidered a Hauppauge but it was too expencive. The one I got (from avermedia) was cheap and have the basic functionallity. But as you said, a hardware encoder would be good to have. Ive experienced allot of frame-loss in my first tests with the card. Using Pinnacle studio 8 is perhaps a bad option.

[sfheath]

The trick with software encoding is to be careful you don't have much else running. Hauppauge Support themselves recommended to me Enditall. How superior that is to the XP Task Manager I'm not sure as I've never actually got round to using it
I've heard Pinnacle is a bit of a resource hog. An option might be to try the Showshifter software as a free trial, www.showshifter.com
Check out their site to see if they support your card?

[neversleep]

hehe yeah I agree that pinnacle steals allot of resources. Allthought I dosen't seem to help using a "lighter" software. I couldn't even encode with TMPGencode...wich seem to be the lightest program of them all (?)

just posted a question about this

http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=28903

[Bambusbln]

Better dont buy a hauppauge PVR 250. It produces MEG which is not A/V-synchron after ediging.

I had this trouble since I use this f***ing card for more over a year, I have read some posts in various forums about the problem of asynchron Audio/Video with MPEG-videos recorded by the hardware MPEG encoder card Hauppauge PVR 250/350

The funny thing is that the MPEG-2-recording (DVD quality) with this card seems absolutely fine at first and also seems to be A/V-synchron. However as soon as the MPEG gets edited, cut or otherwise rendered again or put on a DVD, the A/V gets asynchron the longer the MPEG goes, usually already noticeable after 30 minutes. Obviously there are lost or "empty" frames in the video which get filtered out by rendering again. If only 10 frames are lost, you will notice this by asynchron audio.

There were a lot of ideas about why this problem occurs and a lot suggestions were made to solve it, some of them helped some people a bit, none of them did really solve the problem. A couple of ideas were just silly, like: "There is a time-code on a VHS-tape which the card doesnt work out well" etc. It is simply bull**** that any digitalizing hard- or software uses the timeline of the VHS-tape, as the only information transferred to the input of your computer will be the RGB-signal and the audio-signal.

Recently I tried digitalized my VHS-videos with another card, a simple TV-card without MPEG-hardware-encoding. I used WinDVR, a wonderful program for recording and the card is (paradoxically also Hauppauge) a Win-TV-PCI. Now wonder what happens? Even with long MPEGs (4 GB) the audio stays ABSOLUTELY synchron, before and also after cutting, editing and rendering again. I tried with many videos and hours and hours of stuff, always same fine result, no problem anymore.

There is only one conclusion:
The hardware encoder of the PVR250 itself produces this problem and Hauppauge doesnt seem to be able to solve it by driver updates (anyway they are poor with new software and drivers, the last ones are from middle of last year, even this card is supposed to go with the new Windows media center computers, poor guys who buy it...). I guess they dont acknowledge the problem or maybe they are simply not able to solve it because it cant be solved by software, only by hardware.

There is only one solution, guys:
Get rid of this f***ing card and sell it as long as still anybody (poor guy again) wants to have it.

For those who want to keep it anyway or cannot afford a new (simple, cheap) TV-card or graphic card with TV-in (ATI wonder etc.), only one thing helps: render your MPEGs in small pieces at 20-30 minutes and then reconnect them, rendering them again. Complicated, time-wasting, but at least the A/V stays mostly synchron.

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[Quality's Proof]

neversleep,

Do correctly and save yourself a lot of effort, learning software which doesn't work, producing coasters, etc. and buy a standalone dvd recorder. You can then send the video (and audio-out) from the v.c.r. directly to the standalone for a real 1 ; 1 back-up.

Make sure the standalone back-ups will play in most dvd players though by re-searching the various forums such as dvdrhelp.com, doom9.org (or .net), etc.. Hauppauge is not a good idea and no card solutions are, as standalone recorders are now @ ~ $300.00. I would wait until next drop in price and Pioneer, etc. drops also and spend some extra and get top quality.

If you have to, though, find a software that would use your tv in jack on the video card and directly record from the v.c.r.. You would need either a macrosplat tolerant card, a software hack or one of the notorious macrosplat "black boxes".

Standalone is the better solution.