I’ve got a Pinnacle Dazzle 100 USB capture device which is good enough, but the software that comes with it is inadequate for what I want to do. The software – which I use for direct-to-hard-disk capturing – works perfectly as far as it goes, but since it’s primarily designed for output to DVD, it takes a long time to start and stop recording and does not allow the user to pause a recording in progress.
That last is the feature I’m looking for: The ability to pause and “un-pause” recording quickly if not immediately, just as you can do with a VCR. I frequently just want to record a few short snippets rather than entire programs, and I have found no good software to do this. Note that I don’t want to start a new file for each snippet, either. It doesn’t need to be freeware. The laptop I use for most recording runs Vista SP1.
I tried the freeware app Debut, which seemed to provide this feature, but not only wouldn’t it record audio from the USB device (it didn’t even provide the option!), the video it recorded was ridiculously jittery. A total failure.
I’ve asked around on other fora, but no one’s even answered. But the SDMB has always come through for me.
I’ll give it another try, thanks. I’d found it overly powerful (and thus overly complex) for me when I tried it a couple of years ago, but I’ll try again.
Well, KneadToKnow, VirtualDub was as complicated as I remember it, but I managed to get it to capture video from my Dazzle. However, like the last three alternative programs I’ve tried in the last few days, VirtualDub just won’t capture audio from the Dazzle, making them all useless.
At this point, I’m open to suggestions for a cheap alternative to the Pinnacle Dazzle system that is an inexpensive external hardware & software combination that will allow me to do what I want (i.e., pause and un-pause recording immediately)? A USB device is preferred but a cheap firewire device would be acceptable. The hardware and software don’t have to be packaged together. The software must run under Vista, however.
You have a card that is receiving television signals, and you want to record them to hard disk in realtime, with no delays when you pause, and full audio capture at the same time. Am I right?
Did you set both the audio and video capture options in VirtualDub to “direct stream copy”?
You might also need NanDub, which is an extended version of VirtualDub for XviD capture, though that may be a somewhat outdated requirement these days.
Not quite. First, the Dazzle is not a card, its an external audio/video device that connects to my computer (a Dell laptop running Vista) via USB 2.0. It isn’t a tuner, it just allows either composite or S-Video video input and stereo audio input via RCA jacks.
Here’s a link to the manufacturer’s page for the product: Dazzle DVD Recorder
Yes, but that ended up being the laptop’s built-in microphone rather than the Dazzle’s audio.
Since all the software I’ve tried so far has had this exact same problem with not being able to recognize the Dazzle’s audio, I’ve got to assume that there’s something non-standard about the Dazzle driver, with the end result being that I have to use a Pinnacle software product to be able to capture both video and audio. I’m going to research that now.