Video-Capture Reviews

I bought this so that I could use my brand new Sony Wega as a large monitor.

Pictures and Video look fine. Text is unbearably hard to decipher.

I went to AverMedia web site and found this FAQ when troubleshooting the image issue. ...

Even they tell you that it is not going to be perfect.

So unless you are going to use your PC as a DVD or Picture player don't waste your time and money.

After messing around with two video cards from another Mfg (that I could not get to work, my Quick play arrived today and it is a Great little product. It's quality is better than expected and in combination with Avermedia's PCI 350 TV tuner, I have my own PVR at a fraction of PVR/TiVo prices.

One word of caution, make sure your Display settings do not exceed the max. I made this mistake and took me a while to figure out why it was not working-Pilot error.

This is simply the best priced adapter of it's kind. I purchased the AVerMedia QuickPlay origionally for my notebook computer so I could play movies from my computer onto my television. It's uses are limitless as anything on your computer screen can appear on your television, such as movies, computer games, photos, presentations, and you can even use your TV as an extended monitor to do play these things on while having full use of your regular desktop at the same time!

The adapter comes with component (Pr,Pb,Y) and S-Video hookups for your television (the Y of the component can be used for standard RCA Video-In on composit TV's.) There is a VGA passthrough cable to hook up your computer monitor as well. The whole adapter is powered through a usb cable (used for power only, you do not need to install any software,) which is perfect for mobile computing users. There's 3 levels of anti-flicker protection and three levels of adjustable contrast, as well as a button for shrinking or filling the frame of your TV and ones for positioning it.

I previously purchased a VisionTek Ti500 for $400 when it first came out.

Within a few months, the fan failed and the card overheated. Rather then send me an RMA, they sent me a new fan without any instructions on how to replace it - it was no straightforward and the install chipped a ceramic on the board.

They replaced it with another card whose heatsink simply fell off of the card.

When I requested an RMA, they said that VisionTek had gone bankrupt and that they were the new VisionTek who was not required to honor the warranty. They offered me an upgrade option with several cards - all but one resulted in a higher price for the upgrade then to buy the card at Best Buy.

I offered them to exchange me their lowest-priced upgrade card, which would have cost me $40 (mind you, my original card was $400), or I would escalate and FedEx the company CEO at the following address:

Hartford Computer group, 1610 Colonial Parkway, Inverness, IL 60067

and post my experience on online store reviews.

They failed to respond in 2 days, so here is the result.

Please note that I am neither advising or dissuading anyone from buying their cards, but simply posting a truthful and unbiased account of my experience with VisionTek.

This is a sweet card. I only paid $150 for it on here a few weeks ago. Don't use the drivers on the CD though, they stink. Go to ATI's site and get the latest. This card simply rocks in all of my games. I can run all of my games at 1024x768 with most settings maxed out. Halo performs well. Doom 3 Alpha doesn't stutter a bit even with dynamic shadows enabled. Currently running Far Cry demo, Max Payne 2, Jedi Academy, Unreal 2, UT2004 demo, Raven Shield, and Need for Speed Underground with no problems. Everything looks awesome! I did have some issues with Call of Duty "stuttering" which I could not resolve. This card is definately going to perform when D3 and HL2 come out!

my crazy ring;

Athlon 64 3200
MSI KT8-NEO
1 gig ram
120 Maxtor drive
12x Plextor DVD
19" Samsung LCD

I have the Sapphire version of this graphics card and it works excellent. I have no complaints whatsoever.

I have used this service about half a dozen times. Some tape conversions have been fine but others have been performed poorly. My most recent experience: Part of my two hour tape was not transferred. I had to return the tape to have the conversion redone and I enclosed a detailed letter explaining that only part of the tape was transferred to the DVD. The second transfer came back, with even less of the tape converted and misspellings in the custom description I supplied to be printed on the DVD and box. I assumed that an order being reprocessed would have received at least a little extra attention, not less.

I don't want to waste any more time having the conversion attempted for a third time and I would be extrememly nervous now about entrusting an irreplaceable tape to this company.

I wanted to find a service that was easy enough for my parents to use, and high enough quality that it would be worth the price and hassle. The options I found were a number of software products for the PC (too complex) and a few mail-in services like YesVideo that parse the videos into equally-timed chapters, which I thought would be annoying to view and search.

So I opted for YesVideo and ran a test. The test consisted of (holding my breath and) sending all 29 family videotapes we've recorded over the years of our kids growing up, and waiting to see what was returned. I did this without the knowledge of my spouse -- gambling with my life.

I was impressed and extremely satisfied with the result. The service was much faster than I anticipated (only a couple of days), and the quality was terrific. Video and audio both. The intelligent parsing of the footage is much appreciated -- we can skip over the embarrassing stuff (like me in a swim suit) and not have to search for our son's birthday or our daughter's first steps. The DVD case also has screenshots on the front that make searching a real cinch -- this is a big deal when looking through 29 volumes of video for the right moment in time.

On top of all this we got a photo CD with a bunch of digital photo-quality still images taken from the actual video footage. Not sure how they decide which ones to take, but it turned out a bit like a roll of film -- some good ones, some bad ones, and one or two that you want to put on your wall. Of course, they also returned the original videotapes, but I'm guessing the DVDs will outlast the originals anyway.

In the end, I surprised my spouse with the achievement of transferring all of our memories to DVD, and she was very pleased. (And I got doubles for my parents, which I'm saving for a Christmas present.) The test was a smashing success, and I'm going to recommend the service to everyone. It's a great service, and definitely worth the price. I don't know of any other reliable way to convert taped memories to DVD with such ease & efficiency. I give it 5 stars.

After crashing my PC six times trying to transfer my camcorder tapes to DVD, I found this mailer kit. It works like mail order photo processing -- just send in your videotape and a DVD comes back.

The DVD has a really cool feature in that there are pictures from the video that are used as a menu screen on the outside cover. This is great for reminding everyone what is on the videotape that has a title like "Summer 1998". There are also music videos on the DVD made from my own footage. This was interesting but I wish they were a little longer.

All in all, this is a great service at a great price. I wish I could get my money back for my fancy PC with its DVD drive.

This product has many defects and bugs in it. My friend had the same product and she said her sound was not working. I went over and her speakers were turned off, so I turned them on and it worked. She said even when the speakers were turned on, the sound for the tv didn't work. I thought she was crazy. A few days later, I installed this product on my computer, and frequently the sound did not work. I had to restart my computer. Also, if you leave the volume on the tv or radio on high, and then turn the tv or radio off, the speakers make many noieses. You have too open the program, and turn the volume all the volume all the way down for the squeeky noise to go away. And then finally, just two days ago, the sound stopped working completely. I could here some noise from the radio but with squeeky noise, but the tv was just making a whole bunch of noises. Now I finally knew what my friend was talking about. This tv tuner has many bugs. I recommend not buying it. I have a Gateway computer with Windows XP, 1.9 GHz, 40 Gig hard drive and 512 MB of ram. All of the windows security updates are installed inlcluding Service Pack 1. I recommend choosing a Tv tuner other than Hauppauge. But let me add just a few pros. When the radio and tv did seem to work fine, the FM radio was excellent. very sharp sound. It doesn't come with an AM tuner. The tv was pretty good too especially when you want to record a program. It saves it too a special folder where you just click on the program saved, and it plays it using real player. However, recording programs REQUIRES AN EXTREME AMOUNT OF DISK SPACE. I recorded the PISTONS basketball game vs. the lakers and it took almost 3 gigs off my hard drive.

But like I said, save yourself time and money and don't buy it.

I have a 2.4 Ghz Computer with 512 MB Ram running Win XP pro. Installing the device was really easy and took probably no more than 10 minutes. The Radio works and TV is pretty good, but the only problem is trying to close down the program WinTV2000 or WinTV32 after watching TV for an extended period of time. Has a tendency of not wanting to close itself down and then crashes Windows when I keep trying to get it to close. Going to keep it though since it's way better than the USB TV Tuner from pinnacle. Maybe Hauppauge will release a patch for this problem later on. Besides the software glitch, it's really not that bad.

I got this because of the price and because I thought it was good enough. Bad decision! I have WinXP. The software doesn't really work on XP like the company website says it should. In face, WinDVR always crashed when I tried to timeshift it. (I have a Dell Inspiron 1100, 2ghz celeron with 256 ddr sdram and 30 gb hd, i should be ok).

TV and radio reception are terrible. I have an 8-yr-old watchman that gets better reception on the same lenght antenna.

The device doesn't play sound from the mic in. I use a freeware program called funnyvoice.exe to play the audio.

AVI capture is not very customizable and results in huge files. I use an excellent program called "VirtualDub-1.5.1.zip" to capture video and compress it with the newest DivX codec. Rather than recording a 3 minute video off the TV at 120 MB, I get it at maybe 20 MB. But all this software that I use to make it work has taken me a ridiculous amount of effort and the quality of the capture or TV is only so-so, even with cable input. Plus, the audio out of the thing doesn't work so I just plug the audio from my TV directly into my computer.

So, now with these two programs I have a decent video recording and tv-watching device, though the quality is still atrocious and the documentation and customer support at kworld is even worse.

Don't get this if you want an easy ride. I'm pretty good with computers and only recently has this purchase stopped driving me crazy (now that I've found these two freeware software programs).

Bottom line: buy cheap, get cheap.

This product is a complete solution for the persons how want to take the old movies colection and transform to mpeg movie, and you can view tv, record your favorites tv shows, vcr and dvd in your computer with just some clicks with great resolution, and you can use the remote controll to change the channels, and video input, also you can ear the radio, this product have all.
Ahhhh I forget you can turn off your pc from the controll remote.

I really recomend this product, if you want to have fun, and to do some video editing, also you can take to your office and install to view your favorite tv show and futbol games.

No where does it state that this is a black and white tv converter. Also this item seems to become extremely hot. The screen size was also uncompatable with my tv.

I have been searching for something like this over the Internet for months. With this little thing, finally I can connect my notebook (without S-Video output) to my Sony TV (without S-Video input). The resolution for DVD playing is perfect, and I don't have the multi-regional problem any more as with regular DVD player. But might not be so good for demos, because the text, especially the small font ones, are blurred on the TV screen.
After a couple of months, I realized one more thing: it only supports NTSC and Pal, but not the rest (SECAM etc). So if you are going to France/East Europe (including Russia)/Japan, you might have some problem.

I was looking forward to receiving this because not only does it receive cable tv signals, it can handle FM radio as well. First, the good: the radio was fine. The bad: cable reception was very fuzzy, and the sound was bad. Every once in a while things would clear up for a few seconds, but even then the video was jumpy. I installed this in a very high end desktop system, so any argument about the video card being unable to keep up won't hold water.

I've returned this to amazon.com and am probably going to try to order a replacement card, but a different brand and model. The documentation for this product was also sub-par and gave very little in the way of troubleshooting advice.

This product is a real performer, easy to freeze the screen and create a .bmp file, also easy to use. You can't beat it for the price. The only problem I had was loading the driver. It took three tries of deleting the device and trying to reinitiate it. I even tried the add new hardware function that the pop up screen recommended. That didn't seem to work either. I did finally get it to load. Other than that, I think it's a great product. It delivers what they promise. If it had installed easier, I would have given it a 5. My machine is a 1.3Ghz. P4 running WIN2K.

Affordable PCI TV tuner card that just works. I'm using the card on my Linux box. Installing it was a breeze. TV/Video compression is actually better on Linux than on Windows due to BT chipset having open source drivers. RedHat Kudzu will recognize and configure this card automatically for you. If you need TV tuner card that works in Linux this is the best deal. Radio tuner also works and is supported (again thanks to bt OSS drivers) out of the box.

Good luck!

I Purchased this mainly to make home movies and cut a CD. The software that comes with this is very good. Compared to any movie making software this helps to make movie using time line, story board. The good piece was editing. The Editing of movie by dividing it into multiple pieces was good. the software also come with a provision to make the movie in VCD, SVCD and DVD formats. I recommend this for naive users like me to make quality movies/

You have probably read all the product specifications by the manufacturer and other publications regarding the performance and features of the Studio DV. Based on my experience, I can assure you that Studio DV performs as well if not better that all the claims in the product reviews.

Installation was a snap with no problems. However, you may need to stop all other programs running in the background (Norton anitivirus, monitor power-saver, etc.) to provide maximum system resources to Studio DV. Before doing this, some of the icons on the screen appeared jumbled. This is explained in the troubleshooting portion of the manual.

The video capture in "preview" quality works great - it simply shows what you need to know while you are editing. After capture of your scenes, you can select any scene and scroll through it by moving the scroll bar. Ditto for the transition effects and titles.

You can add your own narration by using your computer's microphone as the preview window plays the scenes. You can then come back and adjust the fade and volume levels of the narration track and the other two audio tracks. This is very powerful (but simple) editing features that I was very amazed to discover in Studio DV

Sound editing capabilities are amazing for a product at this price level! You can see the "wave-form" representation of the audio so its much easier to sync a particular part of the audio to the video (such as an audio "bang" sound effect to the video "explosion").

The titling software that is included is A+. Why would you need anything else? I have used $1000 titling software and although I had some additional "whiz/bang" effects, who needs that all the time. The point is to make a great title, put it where you want it quickly and easily and be able to customize it to some reasonable level. Studio DV lets you do all of that.

In summary, if you need to edit you Digital 8 or DV videos quickly, simply and with minimal learning curve and hassles go with Studio DV. I can see even pros using this on thier home movies! You have everything you need to make great looking movies.

Good Luck

I have used this product now for almost a year and have been very happy with it. I tried other products - a really cruddy program from Dlink whose card locked up my old Pentium 233, Video Studio from Ulead(worked well but interface too jazzy and strange), and also Adobe's video editor (way too complicated for my needs).

I was a little hesitant about installing it on my Athlon 900 system but after installing and getting my drivers up to snuff it worked great.

As stated, you must have installed the latest drivers for your video and sound card and THEN installed DirectX latest version (8.0 for the moment). The software and card will work flawlessly. You should also have a large, fast hard drive for your video files in addition to the hard drive that your operating system is on (not just a partition on the same drive). This will keep your video flowing smoothly. I also recommend at least a Duron or Celeron 700 MHZ cpu, and be sure no other programs or Anti-Virus software is running at the same time. Video editing is extremely processor and drive intensive and anything else running will give you choppy video output.

I liked Studio DV because it is logical yet flexible. I could add titles, background sound, transitions, and narration, as well as rearrange and crop the scenes with the click of a button. It will output movies into many formats, including MPG, AVI, Real Video format, or back to the Mini DV Camcorder. I also liked the program because it controlled the recording on my Mini DV camcorder, as mine lacks the record button (older Panasonic, but takes great video in good light and has terrific sound)

The only feature that I would like to have seen added, which VideoStudio has, is the ability to open and edit MPG files.

Overall, I highly recommend this program to anyone who wants to try video editing. It is simple to use but gives the flexibility to create some really cool videos. And because it is broadcast quality, a businessperson could easily make their own commercial and save themselves lots of $$$.

I shared many of the same problems as the other reviewers. I got a brand new PC and moved my card from a Dell to an HP Pavilion 450y. The software installed fine, but everytime I try to watch TV it hangs the computer within one minute. It hangs XP! I thought that wasn't possible. I have spent close to a week going back and forth with Pinnacle Support. At least they respond to me, but it has taken forever for them to basically just give up. They told me to reformat my hard drive and reinstall Windows...on a machine that is 10 days old. Don't think I am going to do that.
Well, I've wasted enough of my time on this...going to buy a TV and just make room for it.

I've not been happy with my PCTV at all. The biggest problem is the driver and capture software call "PCTV Vision" provided with the device. The software seems designed by some armature programmer without much experience developing real Windows compliant applications. A couple of examples: (1) The open and save file dialogs do not use the standard Windows interface, (2) The application window color is fixed light blue and disregards your desktop color settings, (3) There are no HELP or ABOUT buttons, etc. In addition to these cosmetic problems, the software has deeper and more troublesome bugs that are difficult to work around. Version 5.1 of "PCTV Vision" was not even certified for Windows XP. Pinnacle claims their latest 5.5 version is both certified and improved, but I noticed absolutely no difference. I've never been able to burn a CD using PCTV Vision, even though my CDR/W works perfectly with all my other applications. The Pinnacle software relies on Microsoft DirectX for multimedia operations. However, DirectX reports a number of errors (such as improper opening and closing of multimedia objects) whenever PCTV Vision is run. The PCTV driver also doesn't play well with other applications. When I've tried to access the PCTV capture card from another program, such as Adobe Premier or ULEAD MovieFactory, the driver bombs and reports an error. While I have been able to do basic recording using PCTV, I always keep wishing I'd bought a capture card and software that was more professionally designed.

SPECIAL NOTE FOR PAL FORMAT USERS: The PCTV tuner is fixed for NTSC video format on the USA model and PAL video format for the European model. I found the advertising on the box very misleading as it claimed it worked with both NTSC and PAL, but this only applies to the composite input and not the TV tuner itself. I receive both PAL and NTSC signals, but am unable to use my USA version PCTV to record any of the European channels. If you're working with mixed format signals like me then be sure to check that capture card tuner you buy can process them (check the manual before buying if possible).

BOTTOM LINE: The PCTV capture card works, but you might be happier with a card from another company.

I've just bought the PCTV and have noticed some bugs in the software. You can watch TV just fine with the card, but the included Studio software will not run on my system without crashing. I haven't been able to capture a single clip since buying this card. I'm a systems tech., so I have some idea how to troubleshoot PC problems, but after checking out Pinnacle's msg. boards, I'm no closer to figuring out what's wrong. There may be a problem with DirectX 7.0. A co-worker who has almost an identical system (except he has DirectX 6.1) has no problem at all. This rings true for most of the people on the msg. boards, also. I bought this card mainly to watch TV on my PC, so the capture problems don't affect me too greatly, but if you're buying this card to primarily capture video, be aware you might run into some problems.

first of all, (...)it doesn't even automatically set the system audio so you can record TV WITH SOUND, after a few runs, it just blanly fails to start and say you have to reboot!!

the hardware is buggy too, I can watch TV ok, but when I record, the recorded video has a terrible squeak like "ssssssssssssss", drives you nuts, my system had no problem with recording whatsoever before.

Most annoying is their unfriendly tech support, it's in Canada, man, I spent more money calling to Canada trying to fix a crap I for which paid $$$ to ATI , and those jerks in there are like it's not their business and treat you like school kids.
if you want to call 1800, good, 20$ bucks or 2$ a minute, nice, aren't they saying: " these craps we sell are not really going to work, and if they don't work, it should be that way and you should pay extra $$$ to have a WORKING one------ by figuring it out yourself after tolerating unfriendly jerks"

don't ever buy any ATI stuff again, it's not money, it just feels too bad. I have a radeon 9000, it keeps flicking when I play 3D games,

Add me to the list of people who think this thing stinks. I've got a 2.6 ghz dimension 4600 w/ 800 mhz fsb, 768 ram and a 120 gb hard drive...and this thing manages to crash my system every time. Oh yeah a top of the line ATI graphics card too...

I don't know what the problem is, but the program freezes every time I start it up. It asks me to re-install the software each time I reboot the computer. Oh the CD it came with didn't even work either, it had junk stuck all over it and it wouldn't read. I downloaded the drivers and software but that didn't work either. It just keeps freezing.

On top of this, the one time I actually got it to work (for 30 seconds or so), the picture was grainy and horrible, and there were popping noises coming from the speakers.

From the gunk stuck on the CD I think they might have sold me a refurb or something...I'm about to call tech support and go nuts.

So after buying this product in Circuit City and running into problems with this from the getgo, I looked up the reviews on this product to see if others had experienced the same or similar issues as I was. My symptoms included the software freezing up on shutdown and sometimes keeping the computer for shutting down properly (system would hang at 'Shutting Down'). I am running a WinXP for those of you who are curious.
First thing I did was uninstalled the software including the drivers and replacing them with the newest versions from the ATI website (rebooted in between uninstall and install when asked). Nothing improved. Finally, I found in my research on the web that users had experienced issues with their video card not being of ATI brand and the software that comes with TV Wonder. Per one user's suggestion, I uninstalled just the TV Wonder software (not the drivers) and installed a trial version of Cyberlink's PowerVCR II. Worked like a charm and haven't had a problem since! Hope this helps some of you who may have problems currently and/or those who may end up buying this product. If you have a ATI video card (or plan on getting one along with this product), you may be fine with ATI's own TV Wonder software though I was not able to rule that out in my own tests since I do not own an ATI Video Card.