Capture Through TV Turner Card

[Ronnie]

The short of it:

I have a VHS tape, VCR, I TV tuner card with composite video and audio RCA inputs, and a cable to connect the out jacks on the VCR to the in jacks on the tuner card. PrEl 7 does not recognize the card as a capture device. Does anyone have a no cost solution?

The long of it:

For many years I owned a D8 camcorder. If I needed to capture a VHS tame, I used the camcorder's pass-thru feature. It worked well, but that camcorder was stolen a few months back. The camcorder I replaced it with does not have the pass-thru capability. Without thinking about this, I told a friend that I would make him a DVD of a 20 min instructional VHS tape. I have spent about all of 2 minutes seeing if PrEl would capture via the tuner card. It would not, so I spent another 3 minutes seeing if my computer had a program on it that would capture video, but did not find one. I started to look on the internet, but got no where and ran out of time. Tonight I am going to make a serious attempt to capture this tape. Knowing what a resourcefull bunch you all are, I decided to take some lunch time to post this topic.

I do not care what format I capture it in. DV-AVI would be great, of course, but a DVD compliant MPEG2 format would be just as well, if not better. I do not plan to do any editting, so I can take the MPEG2 file straight to DVD Lab to author the DVD. Quality is nice, but this is an instructional video for a friend. I can take a little bit of degradation.

I am hoping that guidance from someong here will save me some time, or even worse, save me from having to tell my friend that I could not do it.
Hopefully someone knows of a free capture program that has a good record of working with PCI cards or some other solution.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

[Chuck Engels]

I highly recommend a digital converter rather than a tuner card Ronnie. I tried it and was very unhappy with the results and all the extra time it took. A nice unit like the Pyro Link or one of the Canopus converters makes things very easy and gives you great quality. And you can capture directly into a Premiere Elements project.
You can see them here http://www.chuckengels.com/shopping/
and Here http://astore.amazon.com/chuckengelsco-20

[Chuck Engels]

Now, after re-reading your post, I see that you really only want to capture one short tape. This is obviously why you said a 'No Cost' solution

What is the brand and model of the tuner card?

[Ronnie]

The Computer is a Gateway GM 5632E. I don't have anything with me at work that tells me what kind of tuner card came in it. I will have to wait until I get home to see.

You are right in that this is a one time deal and I don't want to spend money on the Pyro box. I have read about them for years, as they have been discussed here and in the Adobe forum, but my D8 camcorder did the same thing the Pyro box does and did it quite well. Any VHS tapes that I had, have been converted to DVDs and DV-AVI files archived on DVDs as data. With the un timely lost of my D8 camcorder, I have some family videos on 8mm tape that I can not get to. I do have a friend who has a D8 camcorder. I will borrow it some day and capture them. This leads me to the option of borrowing it and passing the video through it, but I don't know that his has that capability, and when I do borrow it, I want to capture the remaining 8 mm tapes and return it in a timely manner. My mother is coming to visit, so this is not the weekend to stay locked up in my bedroom.

By the way Chuck, I read in a different post of yours that you are looking at getting a tuner card. Now that monitors are bright, fast, and large (well not tv large, a lot bigger than they were a few years ago), a tuner card is great. I have one in a computer in my bedroom and a second in my den. I have the den computer also hooked up to me stereo and tv, so we get a full media experience with it. I also like the Vista version of Media Center much better than MCE 2005.

[Paul LS]

Why not download a trial version of a software and use it to capture. Corel videostudio for example. http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/ ... bview=tab0

Otherwise you could use the free VirtualDubMod. http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... e_id=63653

[Ronnie]

My card is a "ViXS Pure TV-U 48B8 (NTSC/ASTC Combo)"

[Chuck Engels]

Try VirtualDubMod as Paul links to above, should work fine.