All I need is a capture card with composite/S-Video inputs for my PC. But my experience with a few brands (namely Pinnacle) have been asstastic; so does anyone have a brand they can recommend?
Hauppage or AverMedia seem to both have pretty good reputations. I’ve used AverMedia and ATI cards and been pretty happy with them. DVICO also seems somewhat popular, but being a Korean based firm, their customer support is not exactly spectacular (or even satisfactory, in my experience).
Thanks for the reply, I just ran across some Hauppages and they seem pretty reasonably priced.
It just occured to me – do any capture cards have an output on them, so I can watch the feed on say a TV without delay (as is usually the case when watching it through the capture software)?
Another idea! What if I got a video splitter instead, so that could output to the TV and the capture card? Are there any relatively cheap composite splitters (with amplifiers to prevent signal degradation) I should be aware of?
I did this with standard cable. I just bought a splitter at Home Depot. I have an ATI TVWonder card that I’ve used successfully for a few years, it was only about $50 when I bought it but it’s been a while.
IANAEE but splitters don’t need amplifiers. I’m not sure how they work. I suspect there is more to it than just splicing the connections together like a Y-jack, but there are no active electronics in there either. I don’t know in what circumstance you would use a booster amp, and if you did so how you would filter the noise.
When I had Verizon FiOS installed, their signal inside the house was still carried over coax but the tech said my standard splitter wouldn’t work and he put on a different one (which looks pretty much the same to me).
Hmm, well if that’s the case, that would be the way to go. Looks like they’re really cheap! Thanks for the heads-up.