Capture composite video from Pinnacle 330e with VirtualDub?

[hans80]

Hi there,

I'd appreciate if you could help me with my question.

I have a Pinnacle USB Stick 330e connected to my old Windows Vista laptop and would like to capture a video from a Composite Video input (backup VHS videos). Tried to use VirtualDub with no luck so far and always with a message "Unable to start video capture". Any ideas?

This card works very well as a dvb-t tuner with an official app but TV Center software doesn't give access to the composite video input and captures dvb-t TV data only.

I dont't have any experience with capturing videos on a PC so I'm stuck and need help from some experts.

Cheers,
Karol

[lordsmurf]

The post-XP capture drivers are very buggy. This card only reliably works in Windows XP.

This card isn't made by Pinnacle, but "add-badged" (not rebadged) for whatever reason. It's a PCTV card.

It's a shame, because it was a decent card.

[hans80]

Yeah, that's probably true, but I remember that some 7-8 years ago I did manage to capture videos with this card and the same Vista laptop. However I don't remember what software I used and in the meantime I had to reinstall Vista OS so no traces in the system of the previous, working configuration...
Any other open source software I could try or ideas how to make virtual dub to work with the 330e?

[Hushpower]

Try amarectv.

Use your own codec; I have installed Lagarith.

[hans80]

Thanks, I've tried but failed and gave up on using Vista. Seems that with age I loose patients... ��
Gave my VERY old XP laptop a shot and succeeded to some extent. Drivers installed without any problem and I used VLC to preview some content (VHS but also hd satellite TV programs). The quality was very nice during the preview but significantly worse after capturing the content. Hard to describe the quality in words but the image was a bit shaky and not as crisp as the preview. Still playable but like with added a lot of compression to the image. Maybe I'm still doing something wrong or maybe that's the limitation of the processing power of my old hardware.