Adaptec VideOh! USB 2.0 DVD Video Converter Kit

Rating:
Summary: I'm In The Minority, But For A Newbie, Not A Bad Product
Review: After reading the horribly negative reviews about this product, I feel somewhat compelled to chime in with a different view. I've had the Videoh DVD capture device for about 4 or 5 months and it has provided me with adequate DVD's from my old VHS tapes. I have not experienced the problems described by other reviewers (error messages, failure to capture) and have churned out about 20-30 DVD's that all record and play very well. I've yet to ruin a DVD disc. Yes, the video quality could probably be better, but most of the DVD's I have burned using this device have been with VHS tapes that are 10-15 years old, so I expected that the video quality to be compromised because of the age of the tapes, but the result is fine for me. MyDVD, the software that is included with the unit, doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles, but if you do a decent job in capturing the video, it works pretty well.

I have found that best quality allows about 1 hour of footage to fit on a DVD, better quality around 1 1/2 hour and good quality around 2 hours, a little less than expected reading the literature. I use better quality most of the time because it is close to best quality and much better than good quality.

I've seen these devices come down in price a fair amount since I made my purchase, so I recommend it as an relatively easy solution to video capture and burning, but it looks like it can be buggy, so make sure it has a good return policy, just in case.

Rating:
Summary: Works perfectly for me!
Review: I do not know why a lot of people cannot make the device to work. I bought it from a local store so that I can return it easily just in case it does not work.

To my surpusise, the device works perfect for me. I am running a PIII 866MHZ/40GB/USB 2.0/Windows 2000 with sony 510A dvd writer. My main purpose is to transfer my old VHS to DVD. So far(less than a week), I have burned 6 DVD+R using Sonic MyDVD program, without single failure. the Quality is in line with my original VHS video, actually I felt it was better than original. No frame drop or unexpected stop capture. I did not do any video editing, only used the feature to create chapter point every 5 minutes.

Since the device has MPEG encoder itself, it does not require too much CPU power. But you do need USB 2.0 with faster HD.

The only complain I have is it can only burn 85 minutes video on 4.7GB DVD+R with Better setting. That is the reason I give it 4 stars.

Rating:
Summary: Good Solid Product
Review: I'm not sure why so many people give this product a bad review. The reason I bought it was because I wanted to convert some old home videos to DVD. The installation process was extremely easy. I was capturing content in less than 15 minutes and I had my first DVD burned within 2 hours (including creating menus, etc). The burned DVD looks better than the old VHS tape. The only reason I gave this 4 stars instead of 5 is because nothing is perfect.

Rating:
Summary: Don't bother with this product!
Review: If you like to install, uninstall, reinstall and get tons of unknown errors, this product is for you.
I am running this on a 3.2 Mhz Pentium brand new computer with Windows XP and there is no reason it should not work.
To be honnest, I did get it to work for a while (including with a number of unknown errors) but I am unable to make it work again.
I uninstalled and reinstalled several times and the software is unable to find the Adaptec hardware.
Very frustrating and time consuming.
No help from Adaptec either.
This is a wanabe product that will drive you nuts!

Rating:
Summary: Better call it Hassle-Oh
Review: Let me be clear: I'm giving Videoh! 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.

I also tried the Videoh!PCI version but it's the same think (what was I thinking!). 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.