Q: capture card or dvd recorder?

[manthing]

i've only ever tested capture cards. hauppauge pvr 250, ati aiw 9800 and a theatre 550 pro.

in my opinion, the theatre 550 pro gave some fantastic results. and i'm also very happy with my ati aiw 9800.

onto my questions:

will a dvd recorder give better results than a theatre 550 pro or a ati aiw 9800?

which is the more realiable way to record? standalone dvd recorder or pc capture card?

what should i look for in a dvd recorder? what i mean is, how will i detect what goes inside the "box" and not get distracted by the label on the outside? which review sites give all the details?

any help would be greatfully received.

[lordsmurf]

Yes, LSI encoder chips outperform ATI cards. The best LSI chipped recorder are the JVC DVD recorders.

More reliable? Well, I have little faith in digital timers. But so far, my JVC DR-M100S has only made one mistake in the past 2 months, and I think it may have been because of the disc (not entirely sure).

There is no review site online (so far) that is not handicapped by money (give best review to company that pays them most for advertising or freebis), or handicapped by stupidity (giving better reviews because of color or layout of remote control, or only testing SP mode and nothing else).

Panasonic, Philips, and Cyberhome are the 3 worst machines you could ever possibly buy, unless you want totally unfiltered video (no clean-up), you can put up with various noises, and you never want to do more than 2 hours per DVD without serious quality degradation.

Runners-up to JVC include LG, LiteOn, Pioneer and Toshiba.

Everything else is sort of just "blah".

LSI encoder chips handle bitrate allocation well, give clean encodes, and have chroma noise removal and block suppression tech inside them. JVC goes it ever further, with more added filters.

You want the best quality DVD video? Get yourself a JVC. The DR-M100S should give you a great experience. Use DVD-RW and in DVD-VIDEO mode, then rip video to your hard drive (follow guides!) and edit out commercials and make nice menus.

Another benefit of a DVD recorder is your video files are not clogging a hard drive until you're ready for them. Just stack up DVD-RW discs. A few times I even just outright used DVD-R and thrown them away when done.

[manthing]

ta very mucho LS. will sell kidney for JVC DR-M100S.

i'm amazed at how you manage to get to test so many products. either you've won the lottery or you work at a video outlet and are secretly "borrowing" their products!

either way keep up the good work. and in case no one else has told you, you (& the team) are definitely doing a great job on this forum.

[lordsmurf]

I buy things, keep what I want, return what I don't want. I return far more than I keep. That's the way I test, for the most part. Companies also send me products to test, from time to time, usually software and blank discs.

[cp32]

LS you over looked the zenith DVDrecorder. Which is also a JVC product.

Not too exspensive does a great job too.


http://www.radioshack.com/product/in...entPage=search

[Tranzor]

I agree with LS 100% ( I bought the jvc deck and have been hooked ever since). The quality compared to my panny deck was like watching night and day. I also used to use a dazzle 2 (older pci card version) for the pc and that gave much better results than a panny deck, but I had some other issues with it, and it still was not as good as the jvc machine.

The only issue with jvc is if you have a tape with copy protection. Then you will need either a tbc (which I would recommend getting above anything else) or a copy removal device (I own the Sima go-dvd removal system, small grey unit that does the job well).

Even in 4 hour mode (which is why I bought the deck) the results are still extremely impressive (some pass for another machines regular 2 hour speed). You cannot go wrong, buy the Jvc deck