I’ve checked out videohelp.com and googled for capture cards (and information on them), but every source I check out introduces unfamiliar terms and features. I’ve had a Dazzle Video Creator suggested to me, but those have gotten very mixed reviews. For the moment I just want to capture videogame footage, but we have a lot of videotapes that one day will be backed up to DVD so high-quality capture is desirable. For me that means Huffyuv or uncompressed, though high-quality mjpeg will do if speed turns out to be a problem.
Laptop info:
2.5 GHz Celeron
1GB RAM
USB 2.0
No FireWire, though you can use the PCMCIA slot to add that functionality… I think.
I don’t think there’s a separate audio or video card, if that makes any difference.
I just want to grab stuff off the TV, with as little resizing and quality loss as possible, and have a file that all of my video-related programs can read. I have an NLE already installed and that does DVD authoring (which I haven’t tested due to a non-functioning DVD-RW drive), so the bundled software isn’t a consideration.
Price range is… whatever I need to spend. How much are we talking here?