A little TV capture Card Review
 

2 Days ago I bought a "Typhoon PCI TV Capture Card" for testing.
(Art.No 50673)

That card is really good! And its cheap!
I paid here in germany at Conrad electronics ( www.conrad.de ) 39.90 Euros.

http://www.digitalfaq.com/archives/error.gif

Its hardware seems to be the same like the Terratec cinergy 400 which costs about 69.00 Euros!
the shipped Drivers of the Typhoon do work very well, I did many tests on that card using VirtualVCR as capt.appl.
The Tuner works well, provides a good a/d conversion and the signal seems to be anti-aliased which another but BT878a card I tested does not got. And thats also because of that good 9bit Philips SAA7134 Chipset.

It comes with WinDVR a software MPEG2 encoder which I directly trashed as it delivers a very bad quality.

Instead of that WinDVR I used as said VirtualVCR and did capturing tests using HuffYUV which gives extreme good but large outputs.
PicVideos mjpeg codec at quality 19 gives also excellent outputs at about 3,7MB/sec video at 4:3 Fullscreen input signals.

Also I used XVID mpeg4 at 6000kbit and Its possible to capture if using a XP2800+ at 704x576! Quality is awesome exept that chroma upsampling problem, when using a YV12 4:2:0 codec when capturing interlaced input signals.

Instead of WinDVR I did a new install of MainConcept 1.4 to see how the mpeg2 720x576 capturing performs. Problem of MCE at capturing Mode is, once you did a setup, you can't safe it! :evil: But anyhow, .... also here it was possible to capture at correct 704x576 PAL quadrapixels and I got a CPU load of 90% with no framedrops within 2h.
But when capturing at mpeg2 also here was that problem with chroma upsampling and therefore little blocky parts at red coloured parts, but thats a 4:2:0 capture issue and does have nothing to do with the cards hardware!

Conclusion:
For only 39.90 Euros you get a very nice card Tuner Onbard with Stereo Sound and when using a YUY2 based codec like mjpeg or HuffYUV the result is very good.

There have been reports that a simple change of one value according to overlay of the card in the windows registry will also be make the wdmvfw Wrapper able to capture in Virtual Dub at full Resolution.

Here's the URL to that card and maybe you find a cheap mailorder store by using price-search-engines in the www.
http://www.anubisline.com/english/ar...0673&catid=002