ATI All-In-Wonder 9200 LE vs ATI TV Wonder PRO

[Simon0]

I have an ATI All-In-Wonder 9200 LE (Wal-Mart edition) and an ATI TV Wonder Pro (CX88xx-based Retail edition) cards. Which of these would give be better VHS transfer results. The production date of the ATI TV Wonder Pro is newer than the AIW 9200 LE. The CX88xx chipset looks impressive from the specs... Anyhow, is the Theater 200 "better" than the CX88xx chipset? They both come with MMC 8.6/8.7...

I'm going/hoping to use it to convert some VHS tapes using WinXP, but surprisingly I was able to manually configure them to use Windows 7 32-bit by using manually extracted MS Vista 32-bit Display drivers & Latest ATI WDM_SP Drivers. I was able to do some capture using VirtualDub and VirtualVCR on both of these cards installed in the same system at the same time (Probably not a good idea) but with WinXP, I could get Picture-in-Picture in the old days ;-) Also, MMC will probably trash Windows 7, so WinXP will be my final setup.

I'm figuring, I should take one card out as I have a an old Nvidia FX5200 I can use in combo with the TV Wonder Pro or just use the AIW 9200 LE.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated..

thanx

[Mejnour]

From what I learn so far, theater100 and theater200 are "no brainer" choice

[Simon0]

Thanks Mejnour for the advice...

Interestingly, after digging around yesterday, I found I also have an old Matrox RT2000. This is a dual card combo system, a G400 Flex3D Video card that has a ribbon cable which connects to a massive capture card which has a break-out box and bundled ALOT of software such has Premier & various realtime effects (which I probably have no use)... It does 8 Mbs/s realtime MPEG-2 hardware captures and claims audio/video locked to maintain sync...

When it first came out it costs about 10x as much as the AIW 9200 LE but later lower cost models such as the RT2500 could use other "DirectX 8 or higher" AGP graphics cards.

I don't really have too much knowledge about the Matrox cards, as they are semi-professional gear...

So, does anyone know if the Matrox RT2000 using it's built-in MPEG Encoder system captures higher quality than the All-In-Wonder 9200 LE using it's hardware-assisted MMC 8.8?

Thanks...

[Mejnour]

What do you want to do with your tapes, that the point!

I mean if it's just for putting on a PC, I would says don't bothers and use lousy codec like MPEG.

But if you plan to do some heavy video editing, you should use a lossless codec. AIW cards can do that for the best bang for the buck!

About what you want do to read post#9

As someone told me. Lousy for family party and lossless for wedding

[lordsmurf]

The RT2000 was a nice card for its day. It cost more than ATI did, but it wasn't necessarily better. It was an NLE card, meant to plug into Adobe Premiere 5 and realtime process effects in the hardware. ATI really screwed up Matrox and Canopus when the AIW Radeon cards came out, because the ATI cards offered not just MPEG, but lossless/uncompressed AVI, and at a fraction of the price. Matrox tried to release a competitor card, but it was rather lousy. NJRoadfan has posted about it before -- search his past posts on the site.

The Matrox is a professional NLE cards -- not semi-pro.
The ATI was semi-pro because it doubled as a "TV tuner", which was a consumer feature. But still pro quality.

I would say the cards perform about the same for MPEG encoding.
Getting that ancient Matrox card to work in anything other than Windows 2000, however, will be a pain. You can probably forget Windows XP.

I used some Matrox cards about 10 years ago. I used to want the RT2500+, then the RT.X100 -- but it never happened. Probably better than way, anyhow, seeing how Premiere and Windows moved on. I can still use an ATI card in Windows XP SP2, and import to Premiere CS4 -- fat chance on that happening with the Matrox setup.

MPEG isn't lousy from Matrox, just for the record.

They use a proprietary MPEG codec that's quite nice. It was ported to the VfW system a couple of years ago, and we can now use it in VirtualDub! It's MPEG inside of an AVI file.

The Matrox card is cool and all -- people like me will give a nod of respect -- but for your normal workflow, you'd be better off with that ATI.

[NJRoadfan]

The Matrox RT2000 came with the same blue breakout box (minus the TV tuner) that my Marvel G400TV has. The card did work under Windows 2000/XP since it used a C-Cubed DV/MPEG2 codec chip and not the infamous Zoran MJPEG chip. Looking at a period review, the chip supported DV, DVCPRO, MPEG2 I-frame and MPEG2 IBP. I can't find a high-res shot of the board to see with the digitizer chip is. The biggest problem with these cards is that they are usually Premiere centric, capture outside of that program can be hit or miss.

Pinnacle also sold a line of cards called the miroVideo. Most of these were rendered useless by Windows 2000 due to that blasted Zoran MJPEG chip, although someone did write a driver for Windows 2000, but it likely doesn't work in XP. The only nice thing about these cards today is the nice breakout box the miroVideo DC50 and DC2000 came with. Other then that, they are pretty much obsolete and overkill for VHS transfers.

[Simon0]

It was a pain trying to install it under WinXP as the software needed updating to a later version or else only Win2000 would work, luckily I had it burned onto a CD many years ago, and it made it WinXP "compatible", perhaps because of the break-out box, which made the capture "less noisy" it seems. The AIW 9200 LE also uses a "rudamentary" breakout box, though. I'll be capturing to MPEG-2 and cutting it using VideoRedo and/or Womble. I'm just hoping to just dump it onto blu-ray discs with the best quality during capture and be done with it, as VCR's are getting, becoming obsolete (at least for consumers). So, I should still use the ATI 9200 LE for capture to MPEG-2?

The VCR I still have is a Panasonic PV-8450... Is this VCR any good? Mediocre good ?

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

I'll be capturing to MPEG-2 and cutting it using VideoRedo and/or Womble. I'm just hoping to just dump it onto blu-ray discs with the best quality during capture and be done with it

Then capture at 15Mb/s (15,000KB/s) MPEG-2, which is valid for Blu-ray.

Quote:

The VCR I still have is a Panasonic PV-8450... Is this VCR any good?

That's a fairly crappy Panasonic consumer VHS VCR. I wouldn't suggest it. It had infamous issues with blue-screen dropouts.
It will play videos with noisy quality, which will make for really lousy DVDs or Blu-ray.

Quality VCRs are listed here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...ing-guide.html

Quote:

So, I should still use the ATI 9200 LE for capture to MPEG-2?

Since the Matrox card cannot do 15Mb, only 8Mb based on the specs you mentioned above, yes -- use the ATI.

[Simon0]

Thank you for your many suggestions, lordsmurf!

Much appreciated!