What's the best capture card for PAL VHS? I don't want to build a dedicated Windows XP VHS transfer PC, so I'm looking for a VHS to digital transfer adapter. ATI TV Wonder HD 600 USB would normally be the obvious choice, but ATI CMC is required for capturing to MPEG and ATI CMC only works with NTSC VHS, so it's limited to lossless AVI via VirtualDub and HuffYUV for PAL VHS. The thing that makes ATI TV Wonder HD 600 USB great is its near perfect colour calibration, but I've heard that such colour calibration is pretty much only needed for NTSC VHS tapes and that PAL VHS tapes don't suffer from the same issues. If it is correct that colour calibration isn't needed for PAL VHS tapes, then I should get better results with a Hauppauge 610 USB Live-2 since it can capture losslessly directly to MPEG, right?

-- merged --

I've also read that Pinnacle 500/510/700/710 USB can be great for PAL captures if they have the right chip, but from what I've understood there's no way to find that out beforehand.

lordsmurf, do you have any recommendations regarding capture cards for PAL VHS captures? Does colour calibration matter for PAL captures? Is there any way to tell a good Pinnacle 500/510/700/710 USB apart from a bad one? Those are my main questions.

(Sorry for the double post by the way, it seems like I can't edit my first post.)

500/700 is not 510/710. I see that written too often. Not correct.

Pinnacle, like Hauppauge, would have long-lived capture card productions. So a card in 2000 isn't the same card from 2005 or 2010. There were production changes, and those are not written anywhere. And no, the revision tells you nothing. Furthermore, sometimes the company would outrigiht recycle a model number, and the cards are vastly different, not mere production changes.

I sometimes have these certain good Pinnacle cards in the marketplace (and that's the case right now, as of this minute). Sure, you can randomly buy one from eBay/Amazon/wherever, but you're gambling that you'll get a good one. Odds vary per card, but for some models the odds are NOT in your favor.

Colour calibration always matters.

All right, I just copied what I had read in that German forum thread I linked to earlier, my bad, thanks for clearing that up.

All right, it seems like what I had been told about PAL VHS was incorrect, thanks for clearing that up.

I'm guessing the best quality option for me then would be Tevion High Speed DVD Maker (Aldi edition, Made in Taiwan), even if it can't capture PAL to MPEG. How would you rank the Hauppauge 610 USB Live-2 and those good Pinnacle capture cards compared to it? Are there any other external capture cards worth considering and how would you rank those? I've read that Diamond VC500 was good at one point, but that it's the same kind of situation as with the Pinnacle capture cards of getting a good one.

Can the Hauppauge 610 USB Live-2, the Pinnacle capture cards, and Diamond VC500 bypass Macrovision on their own?

Come on tell us the difference between these cards. I only own a Pinnacle 500 USB and would like to known if I should update to the Pinnacle 710....

The Hauppauge 610 and Diamond VC500 don't care too much about macrovision as far as I know (other than some setting in the bundled apps) they hardware is very similar between them. They really don't handle video directly from a VCR source well at all though (very few cards do, but these are still noticeably worse at it than the mentioned pinnacle ones). For normal tapes the cheap way to solve that is to use a dvd-recorder like the Panasonic DMR-ES10 or similar in between to get a stable signal. That doesn't work too well with macrovision tapes as macrovision tends to mess with the automatic gain control, so if you have tapes with that it may be a bit more tricky. I don't know when it comes to the pinnacle ones.

I would not say "at all".

With my JVC HRS9500MS (DIGITAL T.B.C. / N.R. on), my Hauppauge USB Live-2 and nothing else I captured without any problem 100% of >200 tapes I recorded with the JVC, 98% of the ~50 commercial tapes I own (only 1 commercial tape has a major banding problem on the top), and 95% of ~30 tapes provided to me from friends, some in not good shape.

I was able to improve the capture of some of the friend's tape with a borrowed Panasonic ES-15 .

But maybe I am just lucky :wink2:

Well it's workable if you have something with a built-in TBC to fix wiggle like your JVC or a hi8 camcorder (one thing these cards do seem to be able to do reasonably well is to keep audio in sync despite frame drops). From a VCR without any sort of tbc the result will be very unstable though in my experience.

These are all legacy capture devices from the 2000's, The 500-USB is blue and has the smallest form factor because it doesn't have analog outputs, 700-USB is a bigger blue square with analog outputs, The 510-USB is white dome shaped, the 710-USB is black dome shaped, I believe 510 and 710 have MPEG-2 encoder built in, In lossless capture mode they are essentially the same, Manufacturers do change shapes and colors to appeal to new customers and stay in the competitive market, I think when they started making the Dazzle that's when things went astray.

Jwillis owns few and has some knowledge about the drivers and chipsets.

I agree, hodgey. What I learned for sure is that the most important device in the acquisition chain is the VCR, not the capture card

The chips are not the same. Not just the chip model, but on-chip firmware/software.

I won't tell you to buy another card. But you also have to understand that having knowledge of all these devices requires usage (buy, borrow, donate). Failing your own usage, at least getting info from other vetted reliable sources (ie, what I have to do for certain PAL VCRs that I cannot acquire).

I've not had a 500-USB in a long time. But I kept certain 510/710. For PAL, the 510 doesn't work as well as the 710. Because again, the cards are not the same. Not 500/700 vs. 510/710, or even 510 vs. 710. At least the 510/710 is closer than 500>510, 700>710, or 500/700>510/710.

Sometimes you act as if I speak in riddles. But I'm just telling you the facts. The companies are the SOBs creating the riddles (recycling model numbers, etc).

Correct.

Maybe not "at all", but that's not a compliment.
Yes, sometimes luck is factor.

True, but capture card interaction with VCR/TBC still matters. I discuss workflow interactions at various times. A bad or inferior capture card can still degrade the overall output even from the best VCR.

Yes, I did not mean that the capture card is not important, just that in my experience a high quality VCR is priority #1 and a good capture card is priority #2.
We all have seen bad captures because inadequate capture cards, as well as worst captures because low quality VCR/Camera (or tapes, but that's another story).