I'm going to let a capture system go.
This was my secondary ATI AIW system from 2005-2012. (Yes, that means that I quit using it due to my MS/stroke. The system was fine, I was not.) Since then, I've not needed a secondary personal capture system. I used it for many guides found on this site, and mostly used it for MPEG capturing off SD TV and cartoon S-VHS tapes, and lossless captures for restore projects.
It's an older IDE-based setup, but works great for MPEG-2 (DVD bitrates) and lossless (
Huffyuv) capturing.
This system was last tested in March. Worked fine.
- ATI All In Wonder card
- single core AMD Athlon CPU
- 2gb RAM (plenty for capturing)
- 400gb capture drive (10+ hours of lossless capture room, up to 50+ for DVD MPEG)
- DVD burner
I think the motherboard also has a SATA-I connection, but I never used it. You can probably add a PCI card for eSATA, if you want, in order to get 2tb (max) external drives. I can help you pick a good card for that. It has open PCI slots. And it has USB2, which is how I offloaded the captures (overnight).
There's one quirk: Sometimes the power doesn't want to turn on the first time. It's a common problem. You have to turn off the PSU itself (on the back), turn it back on, and then try the computer power again. It usually works. If not, hold in the power button, count to 5, and try it again. I've never had it refuse to turn on after 2-3 attempts. It doesn't always do that anyway.
The first time I turned it on, after being off for 2 years, the BIOS had an error. I upgraded the BIOS with a floppy, and it was fine again. So it now has a new BIOS. (Note: Floppy drive not included. That's my only one!)
Software: It comes fully loaded. If I've talked about it, it's probably on there.
This is a perfect system to capture, edit, and author DVDs. It can also restore, but it's slower.
Price is only $300.
Premium Membership included.
