Happy holidays everyone!
So, considering the most highly recommended capture cards here on the site are ATI AIW cards, and require Windows XP, I wanted to take on the challenge of building a dedicated (VHS) capture box using brand-new, up-to-date platform hardware. Obviously this limited me to one of the few AIW cards that was PCI-based instead of AGP-based. The result-- I built a dedicated, working video capture box using the following (key) components:
MSI Z77A-G41 Motherboard (LGA1155 Socket, Z77 Chipset)
Intel Pentium G870 (Top end of Intel's Sandy Bridge Pentiums, Dual-Core @ 3.1GHz)
ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon VE 7500 PCI Edition (Theater 200 Chipset)
Soundblaster Audigy ZS2 soundcard (XP-era card I still have because it's AWESOME)
Other details -- leftover computer case, Corsair CX500 500W PSU, leftover G.Skill 1600MHz 2x2GB Ram.
I installed XP Pro SP3 (forgot I had slipstreamed SP3 into my USB installer, oops), installed ATI drivers, MMC 8.8, and everything is working great!
I should note that I found the 7500 PCI card *brand new in the shrink-wrapped box* on eBay for $37.50 shipped, which was awesome. Upon opening the box, all the accessories were also sealed, disc and manuals were there, so it wasn't re-shrink wrapped or anything.
Anyway, I hooked the analog composite-out from my HD camera into the AIW card, and purposely jerked the camera around quickly to try to produce video errors resulting from fast motion. The recording dropped 0 frames in the 2 minutes I recorded. I'm using the multi-thread
HuffYUV codec, capturing to AVI with the settings specified in the "Capture AVI..." guide, except the ones labeled "fastest" i changed to "best."
Next I need to pick a couple of tapes that I know have bad time-base errors, and see if the JVC SR-V10U's TBC cleans up the signal enough to avoid dropped frames, and actually let it run for a significant amount of time... but it's 3AM and I'm going to bed soon.
I hope you guys found this interesting
Now, one question -- I'm writing this within Chrome on said machine (yeah, I connected it to the internet... with no virus software. Oops!) When scrolling in the browser, it's very choppy. Same with XP window animations, etc. I tried fiddling with hardware acceleration settings in XP, but they didn't seem to help. Anyone have any suggestions?