VIDEO CREATOR PCI CARD KIT

Rating:
Summary: Should be named Hassle-Oh!
Review: I have been looking for a consumer grade video capture device with MPEG-II hardware compression for a while. I have tested several and have been disappointed with the results. This case unfortunately has been no different. The VideoOh! product comes primarily in two flavors, the USB 2.0 and the PCI version. Having had bad experiences with other vendors USB products, I decided to give the PCI card a try. I initially tried the card out in a Celeron 500 machine, which does fall under the minimum requirements that Adaptec suggests. I found that the video was blocky and had dropouts when it worked and it was using 100% of the processor. It also had some stability problems in detecting a video signal at times. I then installed the card in an Athlon 2000+ machine with 512M or RAM. On this system the card worked a great deal better, but still not perfectly. I tried it in both the better (5.5Mb/s) and the best (6.5Mb/s) mode and saw in both cases the video was choppy and suffered from a great deal of pixelation that was visible both on a computer or video monitor. The processor utilization in this case was about 40% during best quality capture. The software which is bundled is an older version (3.5.2) of Sonic's MyDVD and ShowBiz. MyDVD seems to have some bugs such as not allowing you to write to another drive once you make a drive change, still reflecting the old location internally. The Showbiz editor actually worked very well and I was able to create video clips very easily. The quality of the video after decode/encode through Showbiz was noticeably worse though. I bought this to convert my Hi-8 and DV tapes to DVD, but see that the consumer products technology for MPEG-II encoding is just not comparable to the software products out there such as tmpgenc. If you want low resolution video for the web etc, this product works very well, but for home video it falls short.

Rating:
Summary: Adaptec Video Oh PCI Card Review
Review: I have been looking for a consumer grade video capture device with MPEG-II hardware compression for a while. I have tested several and have been disappointed with the results. This case unfortunately has been no different. The VideoOh! product comes primarily in two flavors, the USB 2.0 and the PCI version. Having had bad experiences with other vendors USB products, I decided to give the PCI card a try. I initially tried the card out in a Celeron 500 machine, which does fall under the minimum requirements that Adaptec suggests. I found that the video was blocky and had dropouts when it worked and it was using 100% of the processor. It also had some stability problems in detecting a video signal at times. I then installed the card in an Athlon 2000+ machine with 512M or RAM. On this system the card worked a great deal better, but still not perfectly. I tried it in both the better (5.5Mb/s) and the best (6.5Mb/s) mode and saw in both cases the video was choppy and suffered from a great deal of pixelation that was visible both on a computer or video monitor. The processor utilization in this case was about 40% during best quality capture. The software which is bundled is an older version (3.5.2) of Sonic's MyDVD and ShowBiz. MyDVD seems to have some bugs such as not allowing you to write to another drive once you make a drive change, still reflecting the old location internally. The Showbiz editor actually worked very well and I was able to create video clips very easily. The quality of the video after decode/encode through Showbiz was noticeably worse though. I bought this to convert my Hi-8 and DV tapes to DVD, but see that the consumer products technology for MPEG-II encoding is just not comparable to the software products out there such as tmpgenc. If you want low resolution video for the web etc, this product works very well, but for home video it falls short.

Rating:
Summary: Should be named Hassle-Oh!
Review: Let me be clear: I'm giving Videoh!PCI card kit a one star rating because I cannot go below that. Otherwise this product would get a big donut!

I'm trying to replace my 2-year old Nvidia capture card that came with my desktop thinking that there should be superior products in the market today, primarily on the quality of the video. After trying Videoh, I changed my mind. Not only this pruduct is far inferior to my Nvidia producing bad quality highly interlaced MPEG2 video, it is also greatly limited in features. For example, it comes with no universal WDM video capture and A/V crossbar drivers, thus making it impossible to use it with feature rich software such as iuVCR or Windows Media Encoder. It only works with the bundled Sonic MyDVD software it came with which I personally dislike. MyDVD has no scheduler for recording video at predetermined times and even worse you cannot set a time limit once the recording started. Also unlike iuVCR you cannot set video encoding options or even use a software codec like MPEG4 or DivX!

One other annoyance I had with Videoh! was that while capturing with MyDVD there was a one second delay between real time video and captured video. This does not happen with my Nvidia capture card.

After the fiasco of trying Videoh! including some other hardware around the same price range such ConvertX™PX-M402U from Plextor®, I thing I will shell some more money and buy a semi-professional video capture card probably by Canopus or Matrox.