Help! Fierra and I are trying to find a video capture card for our PCs that can accept TV input from BOTH NTSC and PAL Europe. We have her European VCR working just fine with a 220V 50Hz voltage inverter system that I rigged up, and we need to be able to view her 500+ videotapes of extreme lesbian sex acts. I’ve been researching some, but I keep finding cards that are only one or the other. Anyone know of any cards that can read in both?
We’ve looked at “universal” VCR’s too, and they seem quite dear. Maybe $350 or so, and the reviews on them are not glowing.
Or, are there popular models of TV in the US that will take NTSC and European PAL as an input?
(note that I specify “European PAL”, only because I have been told that PAL in Latin America is different… )
As an added spec - and I hate to be picky, but these things can be somewhat troublesome to get to work- we are trying to find a “big name brand” version, out of the (possibly) vain hope that we would have better drivers and support.
Hauppauge makes very popular capture cards with excellent drivers and software. The WinTV PVR seems to match all of your requirements. Note that the TV tuner can only be either NTSC or PAL, but it can capture both NTSC and PAL signals through its composite or s-video inputs.
If you want to do further research, I recommend checking out the “Home Theater Computers” section of the AVS Forum. Be forewarned that there’s an insane amount of information there and it can take a lot of time to wade through it all.
Thank you, Hodge, that looks like it might do the trick. But can you answer a question for the VCR/Video clueless (me?). When it says:
Is “composite” in this context referring to where you typically have two audio patch cables and one video cable? Or does it mean where you have one cable that carries all of the signals? And I wonder if they mean “PAL Europe” or “PAL Latin America”…
That’s correct. The connectors are also known as RCA plugs and are typically colour coded as red and white for left and right audio channels and yellow for video. The term composite refers to the fact that the video information is all combined into one signal. This is in contrast to s-video where the video information is split into two separate signals, one for colour, the other for luminance.
I believe Hauppauge is based in Germany, so it would definitely be PAL Europe.
This, like everything, can be confusing if you do not know a few things and can be extremely simple if you take a moment to learn a few basic things.
PAL, SECAM & NTSC are strictly schemes to encode color on a TV signal. They have nothing to do with other characteristics of that signal like number of lines, frame frequency etc.
Even countries in Europe who use PAL do not necessarily use the same basic signal. For instance The UK used to use PAL A and has now moved to PAL I. Spain Used PAL B and is moving to PAL G. Thay all use PAL but the channels may have different bandwidth, video to sound separation etc.
Then you have schemes for encoding the stereo sound. In PAL countries I believe NICAM is the system of choice.
Now, a tuner card is going to be pretty specific but, if you need both PAL and NTSC, with the going prices of cards these days I would just consider getting one of each and installing one in each computer. That’s the quick and simple way of resolving the problem. Get one of the two and do all the movies you have in that system. Then start with the other system. If you really want to get technical then there are other solutions but that one seems the simplest by far. I’ve had a tuner card with that intention for almost a year now and still haven’t gotten around to getting started yet _
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