Video Capture

The Hardware

There is a huge selection of capture cards out there so we have created a list of some of the best consumer end video capture cards in the market today.  Let's have a look!

If you notice, we have listed quite a few products from ATI.  The All-In-Wonder product line are superb video cards that have a TV tuner as well as video in and video out support.  They are all excellent products and highly recommended.  The AIW 9700 is currently the cream of the crop and is considered one of the best video cards on the market right now.  The ATI MMC software (we will look at shortly) is excellent and has a great scheduler and some very neat features as well.  All of the ATI products above are actually video cards except for the TV Wonder VE which is their stand alone capture card.  Hauppauge, Pinnacle & Dazzle make some decent external USB capture cards if your looking for an external device.

The Software

For capture software, we will be looking at ATI's Multimedia Center (MMC) which is bundled with any of their AIW cards or the TV Wonder VE capture card.  It's an excellent tool and ATI just keeps on making it better and better.  We will also look at another app called Virtual Dub which will also be featured in the editing section of this guide as well and take a peak at Ulead's latest video suite, Ulead Mediastudio Pro 7. 

ATI MMC

Since we will be using an ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 7500 card for this guide, I will show you their excellent software suite which includes there TV application.  ATI's TV app is an easy to use, highly customizable video capturing application.

The TV application will allow you to record/capture from the following sources:

• TV (via TV tuner)

• Composite

• S-Video

The software allows you to capture video in a variety of formats including VCD, SVCD & even in DVD quality. 

ATI's TV app will compress captured video in real time but you can also select your own custom capture settings such as uncompressed AVI format and even Windows Media format.

One excellent feature of the TV application is the scheduler.  You can use it just like a digital VCR.   You can schedule recordings and set the duration of each recording as well. 

The Scheduler will allow you to run the event either once or schedule it Daily, Weekly and even yearly. 

As you can see, ATI cards come with excellent software to capture/record video from any source in just about any format you desire.  

Next: Video Capture-Virtual Dub