Professional video capture card

The transformation of amateur and professional video into a digital form for recording onto a Video-CD or a DVD disk is very popular nowadays. Digital storage devices are very convenient and it is good to edit and view video with new software tools. Actually, anyone, who has proper knowledge, is able to perform the video capturing and create his own digital movie. If you are interested in this issue, then you should think about purchasing a proper video capture card.

There are many propositions for video capture TV cards, which provide a high quality capturing. Thus, if you do not have much experience with these features, you should think twice which video capture card will meet your requirements. If you do not need professional features, a simple video capture card on the Philips chipset will be a good choice for you. There may be no need to obtain expensive Radeon units.

However, the choice of the video capture card is not the only thing you should take care about. The software is also very important for video capturing activities. For instance, if you have a video capture card on the Philips chipset, then you should install some old WDM drivers. In this case, you will be able to quantize even a video tape with the Macrovision protection.

You need some fast codecs for a fast capturing. If you are going to perform the capturing without losses, you need a real time codec. The codec Huffyuv is an ideal solution to capture a signal without losses. Thus, a compressing coefficient for this codec is low enough and you will need 60-80 GB for a two hour movie capturing. To achieve a more efficient compression, you should use codecs with the distortion of an input signal. Commonly, these distortions are not critical and you will notice them only with the highest quality signal.

This family of codecs includes so called M-JPEG codecs. The most popular items are the PICVideo MJPEG Codec and Morgan Multimedia MJPEG Codec. The choice is only to your taste, but you should note that the PICVideo provides a lower loading at work. At the same time, it does not present any quality leaks.

You can also prefer a video capture card with MPEG2 codecs. In this case, you can save some disk space, though you will get losses of quality. A video compressing and the following storage are procedures that require a codec with high compressing coefficients. Usually, people use MPEG-4 codecs. There is plenty of them. The most popular of them are DivX and Xvid. The format Microsoft Windows Media Video 9" is very popular. Its original version is WMV and there is also a separate codec, which allows to create AVI files by any coding software.

There are many capturing software products that you can use sufficiently. The most popular software of this type is VirtualDub. This software works with the driver Video For Windows. This driver has restrictions by the resolution 352*288 for Windows NT systems. If you have the 9x system, then you do not have restrictions for a picture size. Essentially, there are three software products that are working with Direct Show drivers proficiently and are available for any user - they are the FlyCapDS, AMCap, Iuvcr and VirtualVCR.