Rebuild: Part 2 (Video Capture)

Given that the last one got to be a rather long-rambling post, I left off some details along with a few other things. So here goes. There is one very important item that hasn't been acquired for either of the computers that I "finished" last week. Really....are they ever finished?!? And that's vid-capture/TV Tuner cards. Since they generally come all together on one adapter they are pretty much the same thing, but really I just need one for the "workstation" and the other for the HTPC.

The very one remaining capability that I need to put into the workstation is the ability to capture video from older analog sources such as VHS tapes that we (like most folks) have squirreled away in various boxes and closets. That's one of my "honey-does" that I really need to take care of, so some of this stuff can be archived into a digital format. The "Blackbird" workstation rebuild that I described in the last post is more than powerful enough to take care of that kind of thing. In fact, other than digital photography, this is the exact thing that, that computer was built to handle....along with archiving music off of old formats as well. Really, all I need is an older capture only device, but the problem is that since I decided to use Windows 7, 64-Bit OS, for it's access to more RAM and security/stability, most of the older cards don't have driver support for it.

On the other hand, all I need for the HTPC is the ability to tune TV, but today's television is delivered in both the analog and the digital flavors, I'm again left with the need to get a newer card since they're the only ones that have ATSC plus Windows 7 support. So, what to do?

This is in fact one of those cases where simple frugality isn't of much help, since there is no viable solution other than new or relatively new products. On top of that, this is an area where my past experience has taught me that random no-name products can often be difficult to work with and the manufacturers provide little or no technical support.

So, here is a rare occasion that I'm going to go with the de-facto industry leader/standard in Hauppauge. The other plus of using a product from these guys is that they have an entire series of models that all have various features which will allow me to use the appropriate one for the application. In the case of the HTPC, I can simply use there model that has a NTSC (analog)/ATSC (digital) capable tuner that will allow me to use it in a PVR function which has relatively low requirements in vid-capture. However, in the workstation where I'm expecting to pull in lots of analog video and crunch it, I'll probably want to invest in something that does hardware decoding, but little or no need for a tuner since I won't be watching or capturing television. So really that I'm looking for is an older "high-end" capture card that has Windows 7 support. This is going to take some extra research if I want to save money, but it should be worth it.