Video capture on older PC? Is this any good?
 

I have gotten my hands on an HP Pvilion Media Center PC m8000 from 2006 that came with Windows Vista. I have the restore CD so I can bring it back to what it once was. It seems to have several points of capture on it. Firewire, S-Video and composite are all built into it. I have ordered a AG-1970 from tGrant and am wondering if this will be a decent rig to capture on and what I may need to install on it to get the best quality I can.

PC info can be found here:
http://h20564.www2.hp.com/hpsc/doc/p...ocId=c00874901

Cheers!

Anything after early 2000's should be fine for capture.

Firewire would be used for digital camcorders and it's not actually a capture but a transfer of the digital file on tape. This should work flawlessly. Same thing if it's DV capture device like Canopus (without getting into the arguments about quality)

Couldn't give you any advice on that specific Hauppage card but back in the day that was by far the most recommended manufacturer.

Appears to be WinTV-HVR-1600, 74551 LF with Conexant CX23418 integrated video decoder + hardware MPEG-2 encoder chip. Apparently VirtualDub is able to access an uncompressed stream from the card so you aren't forced to use the straight MPEG-2 encoding.

Should be decent...

Good. I will probably need help with the settings in VDub once my 1970 arrives.

It's not really that the computer is "older" as much as it's the OS and available slots.

For video capture, you essentially needs Windows XP. XP existed as the primary OS from 2001 (release) to about 2010 (mass adoption of Win7). Video capture was popular from about 1999 to 2009, so almost all hardware/drivers are for that OS. Drivers were rarely updated for new Windows, as Microsoft changed too much in the base OS.

Furthermore, you generally need at least two PCI slots, maybe AGP + PCI. And these days, computers come with few PCI slots, maybe even 1 total. PCI was replaced by PCI Express. That's great and all, but does nothing for us here in the world of video capture.