# Capture cards for high-quality video

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/capture-cards-for-high-quality-video/380621>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [November 16, 2006, 2:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/capture-cards-for-high-quality-video/380621 "2006-11-16T02:33:10Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Sutremaine](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e495f1/32.png) [@Sutremaine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sutremaine)\
**Post date:** [November 16, 2006, 2:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/capture-cards-for-high-quality-video/380621/1 "2006-11-16T02:33:10Z")

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I’ve checked out [videohelp.com](http://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?