Warm: Leadtek TV2000XP TV/FM tuner card @ newegg

[mrchan]

so.... the leadtek card or the one from intel for someone running XP. all i wanna be able to do is watch/record the simpsons (without any audio/video lag)

 

[mrchan]

also.... any chance there are progammable buttons on the remote? say to turn off the computer?

 

[Outrager]

Once again, like the ATI TV Wonder, I can't get this to work under WinME. The computer would freeze when I try opening the TV program. I tried PowerVCR, but that crashes too. DScaler doesn't work.
About the remote, nope nothing programmable.

 

[TekDemon]

If you want to make SVCDs you have to cap at a high bitrate first then use some kind of software mpeg2 encoding to get decent results at a low bitrate. Yes you *could* probably capture lower bitrate SVCDs but I don't think they look that great(then again I'm paranoid). But yes, I'm paranoid lol so if you don't mind kind of blocky results then it's fine.

 

[Sachmho]

1x TV reception, 1x FM reception, 1x S-video input, 1x Audio-in, 1x Audio-out, 1x I/R sensor

so from reading this, it doesn't seem to have rca audio and video inputs... can you guys confirm this? that kinda sucks, cause i wanted to import my movies from my vid cam...

 

[chibimike]

It comes with an adapter to convert svideo to rca.
You can buy a duel rca - mini-din converter.

mike

 

[Sachmho]

if it comes with an adapter to convert svid to rca, what do i do about audio still? and/or, what's this dual rca-mini-din converter?

 

[chibimike]

You can get a cable that takes the two rca connectors from your camera and converts to 1 1/8" stereo plug.
The leadtek has a 1/8" stereo connector for audio, but it is os dependent as to whether it works.
For me using w2k, I input into my soundcard instead, works just fine.


mike

 

[zinkpig]

is this hot
geforce2 xtasy everything 129 inc of shipping at ubid

note..this is not an auction..its buy it now

 

[thawolfman]

Sweet, just picked on up.....hopefully it'll be here by the middle of the week

 

[Outrager]

That was odd. I fixed the TV Tuner under WinME. Apparently, it wouldn't work when my TNT2Ultra was set at 32bit for desktop. I changed it to 16 bit and it works fine now. Stupid Morrowind made me change it to 32bit.

 

[alyosha]

PowerVCR II works with Winfast card, however the scheduling doesnt seems any better and it allows for less flexibility in recording settings and dosnt' have VCD and SVCD templates, rather something like - Average Mpeg, Superior MPEG-2 and such... Granted those are porbbaly gonna play in DVD player, if burned...
CORRECTION- the main advantage of using POwerVCR is that it offers instant replay feature - like replayTV, through buffer and they now offer - free upgrade to use www.titanTV.com for the online programming download for easy scheduling, making it a desktop Personal Ditigal Recorder, like replayTV
ONE MORE CORRECTION - PowerVCR allows a great flexibility for choosing the capture options - just look under - Advanced capture modes- missed it the first time around - great piece of software...

 

[Dipboy]

For those who are planning on using their capture card to make SVCD's (from analog), I've spent a lot (ie way too much) time trying to figure out what programs are best. While others may have different opinions, perhaps the below will help:

Best OS to use: Windows 2000 or XP. These OS's use the NT File System (NTFS) and are not limited to the normal 4GB file size limit.

Best Capture Software: Either Virtualdub (freeware), or IUVCR (free trial, $25 for registered version). If you are having trouble capturing high resolution with XP, use IUVCR. Both programs use AVI 2.0 (aka Direct Stream) which allows you to exceed the normal 4GB limit for AVI files.

Best Mpeg2 encoding software: TMPGEnc (free trial, $50 for registered version). This programs beats any Mpeg2 program I've tried (and I've tried just about all of them). It also happens to be about the least expensive one out there.

Forget about using Ulead Video Studio or even Adobe's Premiere 6. These programs are unable to handle files (when the video is captured from analog) larger than 4GB. This represents only about 2-4 minutes of video when capturing at 640x480.

Initially when making the SVCD's my player had a problem playing the discs. The problem appears to be in that there is no fixed bit rate for SVCD's unlike VCD's. If your DVD player is having a problem playing the SVCD, be sure to encode using the 2 pass variable bit rate, with an average (video) bit rate of 2048 and a maximum bit rate of 2376.

 

[alyosha]

Thanks for the info Dipboy. I can add to your experience that different DVD players have different tolerance against the bitrate of SVCD. Usually the most expensive ones dont like SVCDS with higher than 2500 bitrate (actaully it is 2.5Mb/s, so it should be 2500 kb/sec), anyway - my cheapo Apex plays 3500 SVCDs nicely. Technically - SVCDs with bitrate higher than standard >max -2524 kbit/sec MPEG-2 (if the audio is in 224 kbit/s), audio + video bitrate max bitrate - 2748 kbit/s< are called XSVCD's or miniDVDs- since DVD is also MPEG2 just at higher resolution and bitrates.

 

[alyosha]

Playing with PowerVCR II, I found out in the supported cards section that both Avermedia and Winfast sport the same BT878 chip (and also the same as Win TV theater and many other cards). Also I dont know with Avermedia, but with Winfast - powerVCR has a channel preview option, where it opened about 16 channels at the same time, however it cant tune them all at the same time, so it just captures a frame, and then moves to the next channel. Those who got Avermedia- could you confirm that Avermedia features a smooth playback of all 16 channels at the same time? Because otherwise it is not a usefull feature and through PowerVCR it is supported on Winfast too.

 

[Chudilo]

The hiss is only there if you use the antenna conection, RCA cable does not produce any any hiss.

 

[ikanbilis]

How about this basic TV card Link? It's only $40 but only support mono audio. Please comment.
Thanks.

 

[Keen314]

<< Playing with PowerVCR II, I found out in the supported cards section that both Avermedia and Winfast sport the same BT878 chip (and also the same as Win TV theater and many other cards). Also I dont know with Avermedia, but with Winfast - powerVCR has a channel preview option, where it opened about 16 channels at the same time, however it cant tune them all at the same time, so it just captures a frame, and then moves to the next channel. Those who got Avermedia- could you confirm that Avermedia features a smooth playback of all 16 channels at the same time? Because otherwise it is not a usefull feature and through PowerVCR it is supported on Winfast too. >>

Unless the card has 16 separate tuners, you ought to expect the same thing. Back in high school, one of my friends had a huge screen Sony TV, and it had a similar channel surf option. It behaved the exact same way that you are describing. It would tune one of the channels for a split-second, then move on the to next channel. I suspect it could be done better, but I believe there's a big enough delay when channels are changed, that it couldn't be improved very much, and certainly not so that all 16 channels appeared to be tuned simultaneously.

 

[S13SilviaK]

<< The hiss is only there if you use the antenna conection, RCA cable does not produce any any hiss. >>



Are you talking abou the audio hiss? If so I've been running the RCA/Svid connection since day one and this hiss is there unless I run the audio like I did up in my previous post. By the way as an add. to that post I don't have the patch cable connected so I can't listne to the radio no big loss for me but others might find it a big loss.

 

[MDesigner]

Hey all

I'm trying to determine the best card possible for capturing video. If it also lets me watch TV & record it, fine....but the main purpose I'm interested in is dumping different formats (VHS, SVHS, Hi-8, whatever else people record to on a camcorder) to digital format, do some editing, and then dump that to DVD-R. Some have said the LeadTek can't handle input from a Hi-8 source. Is this true?

Could someone recommend a good capture card (not too expensive please) that will get clean input (and audio too) from VHS, SVHS, Hi-8, Mini-DV, whatever else is out there... and look as good as possible when it's recorded to DVD-R and played back. As far as audio, I don't know if camcorders record in stereo...but the capture card should also support stereo audio input if camcorders record stereo tracks.

Thanks!

 

[lsman]

how is the Dazzle Digital Video Creator work out? It can capture with some hardware mpeg ability rather than use the all software/CPU power of the plain capture card. So a real time capture?

staples has it for $199, (add something of $1) and with some $40 off and there is a $50 rebate going on. So it should come out around $120 with tax. link

 

[tydas]

MDesigner

There are a ton of capture cards out there like this leadtek, they are all based on the bt878 chip. I have an $40.00 avermedia card and it works well for video capture...be prepared however, there are a lot of steps to getting good captures to a vcd or dvd...the place to go to learn how to do this is vcdhelp

Also, when using any card with the bt878 chip it is better to use enhanced drivers, this guys driver work great and allow me to capture in higher resolutions drivers if you did get the leadtek i would use this guys drivers, some people have complained of not being able to capture higher than XXX by 240...

Be prepared though...when using a software decoder card you need big hard drives and fast cpu and even then it still takes a million years.
You can get a decent hardware decoder for $200 (wintv pvr)

on vcd help start with "How to' capture lossless avi"

 

[Boomer2]

Any idea how this card does with VIA chipsets? My WinTV-Go crashes the system at irregular intervals unless I do a handstand just the right way. Nice how Hauppauge buries the problem in an FAQ you have to practically threaten them to find.

Please PM me if you can speak to its stability/compatibility with VIA chipsets.

Thanks!

 

[Sandor]

I have a VIA chipset (ABIT-K7A), and it seems to be quite stable. As a side note, no matter what I did, I couldn't get it to work in XP (I have no idea why, and no one else seemed to have this problem). But in w2k, it works great.

 

[Technogeek]

Wow