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Originally Posted by Caputnoodle
This question is mostly directed at LS who just sold me a great VHS digitization workflow, but other advice is welcome. I have an early 2000s PC that I built with Windows XP and an ATI PCI capture card as well as an AGP ATI All-in-Wonder 9700 Pro.
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Which ATI PCI card? Due to ATI having conflicts at times, I've never been a fan of installing too many ATI cards at once. At most, an ATI AIW and the ATI 600 USB. When ATI MMC is involved, things can get weird, go sideways on you. Not always, but can.
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(It was a monster back in the day. I pre-ordered the first SATA hard drives on the market and put them in a Raid 0 with the RAID chipset built into the ASUS workstation motherboard. It had dual channel DDR before that was really a thing. I'd love to put it back to work.)
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I remember when that would have been impressive.
At this late date, I think the most impressive builds are based on that Asrock setup like I have, and a few others here have cloned. Even now, that motherboard is in the $75-125 range.
But, bragging rights aside, what you have should work well. My only concern would be the old SATA-1 limit on drive drive size, well under 1tb from what I remember. Somewhat limiting. Of course, a PCI SATA2 can be added for bigger drives (though not really speed).
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Both the AGP and PCI cards have capture ability and as I recall the quality was the same.
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I'm not aware of it being possible to side-by-side install both an ATI AIW PCI and ATI AIW AGP, so it's surely not both the same card. You need open it, see what the exact cards are. The tell-tale will be the presence of the ATI Theatre Rage/100 or 200 chips, or the craptastic BT/CX (Conexant) chips.
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Any idea between those two and the ATI USB 2.0 capture card you sent what will be the best?
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ATI AIW Radeon with Theatre chips beats everything.
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I'm leaning towards MPEG2 encoding on the fly to make the time commitment manageable.
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If ATI AIW with Theatre, and using ATI MMC, it's a solid method. As I always state, I'm not a video purist. I just want quality. The ATI MPEG workflow is excellent, and I use it myself for some tasks. Not everything has to be lossless capturing. (I also use LSI DVD recorders, and even non-LSI like Zoran for off-air/non-tape recording.)
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The recordings on the PCI and AGP cards always seemed slightly washed out to me, if my recollection from about 15 years ago is accurate. Have you run into that?
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ATI AIW are 99%+ spot on for color/IRE/contrast/brightness/etc. It's one of the few cards that you don't have to tweak for capture. If you saw the image too light, I'd suggest it was the monitor simply not being calibrated. Either that, or not ATI AIW Radeon with Theatre chips.
You need to check and see what the cards are.
