Good deal on TV/Video board

[GenevaDude]

Price of unit is $39. See it here.

GenevaDude

http://genevadude.com http://GoldenBuffet.biz

[Rupp]

??

-Rupp

[glt]

Leadtek..Seemed a little less generic and nicer remote. But 25% more (free shipping though).

Leadtek Winfast TV 2000 XP XPERT

Hope I did ok, I know nothing about these.

GLT

[zoomkat]

The winnov AV PCI card below is a good deal for $30.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...category=33871

[emooney]

I've been doing alot of research on TV cards lately and it seems like unless you have a box dedicated to encoding and decoding the video signal, you have to go with a card that has hardware encoding/ decoding on it to relieve your cpu of the task.
I have a Hauppauge WinTV 350 and am still having a hard time finding software that utilizes both encoding and decoding on the card. I've tried Snapstream and SageTV and both have their quirks.

Hey. What happened to my cool image under my name?!

[bmms]

The Hauppauge Capture plugin in being enhanced to support hardware encoding cards. I just purchased a PVR-250(MCE) to peform development and testing with. I am very happy with the picture quality and low CPU load to perform MPEG captures (about 20% on a dual PIII 868Mhz)

[jrfuda]

Automated outlet has multi port cards for a pretty decent price: http://www.automatedoutlet.com/customer/home.php?cat=24

If you look at the price per input, they're cheaper than the options mentioned earlier, and only take 1 PCI slot for 4 to 16 cams.

[JimCirillo]

Be careful with the Grandtec Capture cards. I have the 9-port version. The main problem is that you can NOT use their software if you have any other video capture device installed on your PC. I've got an ATI All-in-Wonder video card, so that killed it right off the bat.
You can install the generic brooktree driver (card has a conexant built bt878 capture chip), but the driver doesn't switch the card's mux, so I can only use 3 of the 9 inputs (probably 4 if I want to solder wires to the 4th board input).

[zoomkat]

One thing about the winnov PCI capture cards is on NT/2K/XP machines, you can apparently put as many cards in a machine as you have available PCI slots. I think a DIY type could also make a TV tuner for the card from a tuner module out of an old VCR. The card has an I2C connector on the MXC video in connector for controlling a TV tuner which was origionally an optional gizmo.

[bruce l]

So who makes the best card - based on ease of use, decent picture and sound (that stays in sync event after "pausing live tv") and price ?

I need a PCI TV tuner card to put into my Kiosk touchscreen thats due later this week.

[JimCirillo]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Jim Cirillo:
Be careful with the Grandtec Capture cards. I have the 9-port version. The main problem is that you can NOT use their software if you have any other video capture device installed on your PC. I've got an ATI All-in-Wonder video card, so that killed it right off the bat.
You can install the http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/ (card has a conexant built bt878 capture chip), but the driver doesn't switch the card's mux, so I can only use 3 of the 9 inputs (probably 4 if I want to solder wires to the 4th board input). <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

An update for anyone who has the Grandtec 9 or 16 port card - the latest revision of the btwincap driver now supports the Grandtec 16 port board, and by default also the 9-port. I can now preview all 9 ports using the webcam plugin, but have the same problem as Dyeend in this post when trying to capture.