Capture Cards - What is the cream of the crop?

[ksarauer]

Hello, I'm looking to the users as to what they believe the cream of the crop capture cards are?

Preferable these would be cards that you have seen in action.

Thanks for looking...
Kevin

[djtaylor]

Applicable for which country?

[stefan]

And what type of broadcasts?

[ksarauer]

Applicable for which country?

US

[ksarauer]

And what type of broadcasts?

NTSC

[stefan]

analogue? hdtv? terrestrial? cable? satellite?

[ksarauer]

analogue? hdtv? terrestrial? cable? satellite?

Bear with me, I'm still learning alot of this.

Currently...

analogue cable

Would like to get hdtv with 6 months

[Braklet]

analogue cable

Would like to get hdtv with 6 months

I have a Hauppauge PVR-500 card for analog. It supposedly has support for analog cable tuning. I never tried that. I use it to digitize my satellite receiver's program stream, connected via S-video. Works fantastic for that.

I did try the PVR-500s NTSC OTA tuner. It was, shall we say, less than optimal. My other analog TV tuners always had a much better picture. I didn't spend much time debugging it.

I recently added an AVerTVHD A180 ATSC tuner to the system. It works well with GB-PVRs latest tuning scanner. HD material required a LOT of tweaking on my system to minimize dropped frames, but I got it working almost perfectly now. It did require a lot of futzing, but I think you'll find that any HD source really taxes your system.

You didn't ask, but I'm fond of the video quality out of my nVidia GPU (6600) and the nVidia PureVideo decoder. PureVideo is extremely quirky however and I still haven't gotten it working perfectly. (DirectShow registrations don't seem to favor PureVideo for some reason.)