So DV bridges have on the fly de-macrovision... any other way of doing that.... I mean most of the good tapes will not have that but some will.

buy a demacro box, most decent electronics places will do it, and all the dodgy gadget/gimmicky places like lik-sang have them too.

About ?10-100 depending on what they do

I got one of them when I started looking at this stuff (apart from archiving my teams AFL matches, I want this to converting my ginormus anime tape collection..) but it just didn't work

probably the wrong macrovision version

hmm... on second thought, wont this shit be a little cheaper in Thailand?

indeed, infact you can get well dodgy (=great) stuff over there, I love all this technical stuff and gadgets. Can remember when one of my friends came back with a floppy disk drive for his snes from thailand (with several thousand games on floppy disks), I was jealous as hell

You going to Thailand? Lucky bugger!

Leaving may the 22nd. So I what I should be looking for then is a DV bridge with firewire, and a macro-decoder?

Pick us all up one!

I'm good to owe you mate - Promise - hehe

well there are lots of options to choose, I went down the DV bridge which means you have a nice box sat on your desktop, you plug the composite / svhs in and you get great uncompressed / DV avi files.

You could go down the MPEG2 route or look into PCI capture cards.

You will need some 1934/firewire plugs somewhere (new pcs and motherboards ave em, macs do (its an apple technology, hence why its so good), sound blaster audigys etc.).

I'd say if your going for a DV bridge, you want a firewire one.

I can't advice you on what brands to go for, I can say that mine is made by dazzle, and is their Hollywood DV bridge, which received great reviews, but is pretty old now. If you choose pci, i don't have much experience with those capture cards, but i believe hauppage (spl?) are a damn good make to go for (they do DV bridges too).

Either way, you will want macrovision decoders to sort out the copy protection. A great many tapes have them, which means when you copy you get b+w, and scrambled images. (mostly retail i found but often home too)

I'm currently looking into Pinnacle cards (those are good right?), but there are so much to choose from! Sorted with the most expensive at top:

Pinnacle Liquid Edition 5.5
Pinnacle Liquid Edition PRO 5.5
Pinnacle Studio AV/DV Deluxe Version 9
Pinnacle MovieBox DV ver.9
Pinnacle MovieBox USB ver 9
Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe Ekstern USB, Retail
Pinnacle Studio Deluxe Versjon 8 PCI
Pinnacle MovieBox USB ver 9
Pinnacle PCTV SAT CI PCI
Pinnacle Studio AV/DV Versjon 9
Pinnacle Studio DV Mobile
Pinnacle PCTV Pro PCI
Pinnacle PCTV USB-2 Ekstern
Pinnacle Studio DV Versjon 9 PCI, Firewire, Retail
Pinnacle PCTV Stereo PCI, TV reciever, Vision 5 software

1. What's with these deluxe editions? They are MUCH more expensive than the regular ones, so I guess there must be some goodies in them?

2. Liquid Edition? DAMN expensive!!!!

3. Moviebox?

4. Cann I use the 'PCTV' cards to rip vhs with? they are quite cheap....

5. Studio DV Mobile ???

PS: Someone just sent me a mail telling me about a new card from ADS Technonlogies called USB Instant, which supposedly is very good. Comments?


http://www.komplett.no/k/kl.asp?bn=&sor ... n=pinnacle