Video capture card that would capture all lines in NTSC?
 

Do you know which video capture card (either USB dongle or PCI card) that would capture all lines in NTSC (525 lines(?))?

Especially, I'm looking at metadata in ones of lines like closed captioning on line 21. It will be nice to have a capture software or card that would also read the captions and put them as a separate track in a video file (avi or mpeg).

Many capture cards have the hardware for it, it's usually referred to as VBI (Vertical blanking interval) capture or similar. I don't know much about the software side though.

One thing to be aware of is that if you intend to capture VBI data from VHS or similar, you have capture directly from the VCR, as using a TBC or DVD-recorder or similar will normally rewrite (or blank out in the case of a TBC) that portion of the video signal. DVD-Recorders can often re-create a macrovision signal, but I don't know if they do the same with other VBI data.

Thanks, I think the keyword VBI is what I'm looking for. Let's say if I get the AVerMedia CL311-M2 PCIe card with AVerMedia Capture Studio software. Should I be able to get what I'm looking for? I'm curious to see if anyone else have successfully try this before.

I am pretty sure the Osprey line of cards has VBI capture capabilities.


Just be sure you understand Simulcast, and why you probably do not want it. Its a feature important for online streaming and drives up the cost of a card ready for simulcast a good deal.. you probably only want the cheaper card without it.

The VBI graph Utility (see page 36) produces a line chart of the VBI information, the drivers also cover a large number of windows versions since they have been in business for over 30 years. It lets you select the line for VBI with a +/- clicker and field 1 or field 2 for the source. (see page 107 for how DirectShow handles VBI capture for NTSC or PAL) You would probably have to use GraphEdit to capture and store the VBI to a file, or redirect to a Close Capture overlay.

As they have been in business for over 30 years their funky Sub-D breakout connectors are pretty standardized.

They have had PCI and PCIe cards... and cascade their drivers, so one PC can cope with having multiple cards and multiple styles or generations of card in the same PC at the same time, capturing at the same time.

Because of their long history you can pick them up fairly cheap from online auction sites (someone is always upgrading and trading out but you might have to be patient), but be forewarned they are meant for "raw" AVI or Full frame capture, the cheapest cards have No hardware MPEG encoding, and are based on a proprietary Brooktree 878 chip design, renamed the Fusion 878 after Connexant acquired the design.. as such they are fairly compatible with a lot of software from a lot of operating systems.

Osprey caters to the online streaming community and is known for stability, but the digitizer is 8 bit, so hoping for squeezing the last bit of info from a poor quality VCR tape is not its intended use.