ADS TECH INSTANT DVD 2.0 (BI-LINGUAL) ( USBAV-702-EF )

Rating:
Summary: Easy to use, install, and operate, 5 star product.
Review: Because of this website and the informative reviews everyone has been posting I have been fortunate enough not to have had to deal with lousy products. So far Amazon.com has made me better able to stay away from the undesirable products on the market.

The USBAV-702 has lived up to every review posted on this site. The unit captures video without any problems I can detect. Although I am not a processional at video capturing and editing, I tend to be quite picky when it comes to quality. Although I haven't been able to test the software provided to its full potential, what I was able to test didn't have any quality issues whatsoever. At high resolution capturing, the video seems to be at the same quality level as that of the original recording.

I have had so much trouble with computer hardware and software that when I purchase a product that works well, without hassle, I have to give it a 5 star rating.

Rating:
Summary: This is the only one that works !
Review: Over the course of the last year, I have tried (and returned) several products from Dazzle (now bought out by Pinnacle, probably because they couldn't make their products work and build a viable business)and Adaptec (Videoh DVD USB2.0). None of them worked. I am using a Sony PC with 1.6Ghz Pentium4 running WinXP Home , 512MB DDR RAM, USB2.0 ports and finally I found one which works! After spending countless hours trying to get the other products to work (re-installing SW and drivers, playing around with registries etc which no normal consumer would even try doing) and getting little real technical support from the others, I felt like I finally reached the promised land with this product. If you have to buy a product to transfer your old analog VCR tapes, home movies to disk, I would recommend you try this first before the others. Hopefully, you will save all the hours I wasted on the other so called "products" which should not have been put on the market in the first place. Make sure you get the latest model (USBAV-702 and not 701)

Rating:
Summary: Finally..... a video capture device that works!
Review: The ADS Instant DVD USB 2.0 is a great improvement over prior attempts to capture and record analog video recordings and transfer them to DVD. I have looked for the past year and tried a number of devices and software programs with limited or no success. Finally, this unit works and works well. Already, within a few days, I have easily transferred 5 old 8mm analog video tapes to DVD using Ulead Movie Factory 2.0 without a glitch, without a crash and with perfect results.

The capture device works perfectly. Capturing is very processor intensive. I have a 2.2 gig Pentium 4 with 528 RAM and 120 gig Hard Drive and I had no problems. Having looked at the ADS web site first, I downloaded the latest version of capwiz from the ADS web site before starting the project. The preview mode is not perfect quality video but the captured result is perfect.... No dropped frames, no lines, perfect quality (to me, indistinguishable from the original medium to good quality video tape). Although the video and audio quality were, to me, indistinguishable from the original, I have not tried copying high quality DVD video or my other VHS tapes yet, but I am sure the quality will be, at least, very good if not excellent.

They provide three software titles. Ulead Movie Factory 2.0, Video Studio 7 and Muvee maker. I haven't tried the Video Studio although, from reviews of it, I expect it to work fine. I am mainly archiving my old video tapes and transferring to DVD. The Movie Factory 2.0 didn't burn to DVD on first attempts. A visit to their web site to download the patch/upgrade fixed that. Since then, it has worked fine every time. Rendering and burning time is reasonable, not excessive. I have also converted to SVCD and this worked perfectly. Rendering for SVCD takes a long time, though. Movie Factory allows you to add index points automatically at specified intervals.... It is a fantastic feature and works on SVCD's and DVD's. The Muvee maker is a lot of fun to use and allows you to make music videos easily. I haven't tried Video Studio 7 although I expect equally good results.

Audio and Video synchronization is perfect with this product. My prior experiences with other products had been terrible with audio and video being very noticeably out of synch by the end of the tape. With this, there was perfect synchronization for the two hour duration of the video tape.

In summary, having been disappointed by so many video editing and video capture products in the past year, I am thrilled to find one that works so well. I highly recommend it!

Rating:
Summary: Generally works great...
Review: The output quality is very high. Be sure you have USB 2.0 and not USB 1.1 on your PC.

The included software bundle is a bit of a mish-mash and could be more cohesive/integrated.

Also, my PC won't boot up properly if the device is attached to my USB port. Unplugging it lets me boot up just fine.

I would buy this again.

Rating:
Summary: First try worked great
Review: This is my first attempt at recording analog video from my camcorder to the computer. I'm using Windows ME, 1.4G Pentium 4 with 384M of 800Mhz ram and a 60G hard drive. I had a few problems getting the drivers to load but the full setup took less than an hour. I recorded a video to disk with relative ease. The software provided is easy to use and very powerful.

The only problem is I guess I didn't need the Bi-Lingual version and could have saved $ purchasing the non Bi-Lingual version.

At first glance ADS Tech seems to have provided a solid product with some great software. I'm looking forward to burning all of my camcorder tapes and old VHS movies to DVD after I play with the video editing features.