Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
My day job as a trainer sometimes offers me opportunities I wouldn't otherwise take. Last week one of those options came in the form of $500 to spend on random video capture hardware. Since I already have a collection of Conexant-based LeadTek cards I'm going to use in class, the $500 went to several products I would not have purchased otherwise, from Canopus and Pinnacle and Plextor.
Plextor?
Yup. The price was right. $129 retail from Newegg.com. The device is called "ConvertX", and it functions beautifully.
It's a USB2-based external unit, largely identical to a Hauppauge PVR-USB2. It has stereo audio, composite and Svideo-type connectors, and has full hardware realtime encoding support for MPEG1 and 2, and for Divx.
The manual claims to can also capture dolby digital, which is one of the reasons I was excited about it, but I don't believe it, since there aren't any digital audio inputs. Points off for that.
I hooked it up to my T41 and encoded an episode of "Angel" off my Directivo using MPEG2 as the destination format, and its default settings (which have cryptic names like "Standard", "Good" and "Better"). It came with WinDVD Creator for a capture/editing application, a program that's feature-identical to Ulead DVD MovieFactory. It worked beautifully.
Capture output was excellent, on par with high-bitrate caps from current-gen AIWs, and exhibiting none of the obnoxious high-motion distortion I've seen from Hauppauge's PVR-xxx hardware. It even did well with the inky darkness that typifies an episode of "Angel" - there was some of the usual MPEG blockiness in dark regions, but upon review, probably 95% of that appears to have been on the MPEG source from my satellite dish.
It's substantially nicer than all things Hauppauge, but as a final reminder in that "nothing can be perfect", I can't get the damn thing to work with Snapstream, my HTPC application of choice.
All in all, I have to say I'm impressed.
Plextor?
Yup. The price was right. $129 retail from Newegg.com. The device is called "ConvertX", and it functions beautifully.
It's a USB2-based external unit, largely identical to a Hauppauge PVR-USB2. It has stereo audio, composite and Svideo-type connectors, and has full hardware realtime encoding support for MPEG1 and 2, and for Divx.
The manual claims to can also capture dolby digital, which is one of the reasons I was excited about it, but I don't believe it, since there aren't any digital audio inputs. Points off for that.
I hooked it up to my T41 and encoded an episode of "Angel" off my Directivo using MPEG2 as the destination format, and its default settings (which have cryptic names like "Standard", "Good" and "Better"). It came with WinDVD Creator for a capture/editing application, a program that's feature-identical to Ulead DVD MovieFactory. It worked beautifully.
Capture output was excellent, on par with high-bitrate caps from current-gen AIWs, and exhibiting none of the obnoxious high-motion distortion I've seen from Hauppauge's PVR-xxx hardware. It even did well with the inky darkness that typifies an episode of "Angel" - there was some of the usual MPEG blockiness in dark regions, but upon review, probably 95% of that appears to have been on the MPEG source from my satellite dish.
It's substantially nicer than all things Hauppauge, but as a final reminder in that "nothing can be perfect", I can't get the damn thing to work with Snapstream, my HTPC application of choice.
All in all, I have to say I'm impressed.