ATI TV Wonder Pro vs. WinTV-PVR-350 vs. something else ?

[petreza]

Hi,

A friend of mine needs a video capture card to transfer her VCR tapes to DVD. I checked for her and so far came up with:

- ATI TV Wonder Pro - cheaper - $90

- WinTV-PVR-350 - comes with a program for authoring DVD - $165

- I saw even some card on newegg that only had S-video and coaxial in - no tuner - and I guess you use the audio in of your audio card - $40

Which would you recomend and why? Is there any other card that you would recomend?

Thanks!

[CrashOveride]

Well everyone I have talked to raves about Hauppage or wahtever but I bet the ATI one would do the job quite well.

[cack01]

I would get the 250 model not the 350. The main difference is that the 350 has a FM tuner which she won't need.

[Mr.Radar]

I second the PVR-250. It has one of the best hardware MPEG-2 encoders on the consumer market (or so I've heard). The higher end ATI AiW cards also have a good encoder, but on their lower end cards the encoder is pretty poor. For capturing VHS tapes to DVDs a hardware encoder is practiacally nescesary due to the very poor quality of the video signal on the tape (even with an extremely high end system and a high end VCR and a TBC and a freshly recorded VHS tape will drop frames if you're capturing without hardware encoding).

[HotKoala]

If ATi ever gets to supporting their TV cards half as well (or at all) as they do their videocards...