Lordsmurf,
I am in need of a good USB video capture device. I have had bad luck with Pinnacle and do not wish to use them anymore. My goal for now is simply to record gameplay from my Wii and upload it onto YouTube, but I do want something that is good because I may end up using this device for other purposes. What products do you suggest?

The only requirements are that it have a USB plug-in and support Vista, as that is my OS. Thank you

This question was asked in a private message. Rather than hide our tech advice in private conversations, Site Staff will often answer PMs (from any site) here in the digitalFAQ.com forum, so that others may read and benefit from our expertise. Please continue the conversation here. Either login or join as a Free Member, and we can continue troubleshooting your video, photo or web related issue. Thanks for understanding our tech Q&A policies.

Recording Wii with USB capture card ?
 

I've never been a fan of Pinnacle products, they just never seem to work correctly. Or at very least, never seen to give the same response twice in a row.

The better USB2 video cards are made by Hauppauge, and tend to be MPEG-2 hardware encoding devices. However, most of these are made for recording television, and only have a coax input. The Hauppauge 1200 PVR is one example, for $55. This would give you a really good tuner, in addition to something that could record from the Wii. You'd need one of those under-$20 modulators from Amazon.com or Walmart, to convert the Wii output wires (composite video and stereo audio) to coax.

Another option is a cheap $30's-range generic USB2 card. These all more or less work the same. Not the highest quality device, you would not want to use it to convert VHS tapes to DVDs, but it would work plenty fine for Youtube videos. Amazon has a Diamond VC500 USB card for $35 with free shipping.

The only thing to note is that virtually all capture cards and DVD recorders have a delay. So recording video games can be frustrating, because your controller commands will be ahead of what you're seeing as output by the device. You might want to split the signal, sending one output to the television, and the other to the computer.