A disaster for me
Written: Dec 17 '02 (Updated Dec 17 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Good price, works for NTSC and PAL. Video looks good on TV.
Cons: Video look bad on computer.
The Bottom Line: It works if you watch the video on TV only. Buy a factory reconditioned one and you may have better luck.
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| yoshimato's Full Review: A D S Instant DVD (USBAV-700) Video Capture |
Is this the functionally you really want?
My VCR suddenly retired itself one day. I asked myself whether I can do without VHS and go into DVD? I can, I don't remember what is the last time that I recorded something from the cable channels. But I have to convert the NTSC and PAL tapes first, with both movies and home movies. I was thinking about using outside conversion services, but the price is too high. But the price is right at about $20 a tape – just running the tape is about one hour. I wouldn't charge less than that if I were to do it. But even if it cost $10 a tape, I would be much better off buying all the necessary equipments myself. Incidentally, my CD drive also retired itself soon after that.
Looking at the whole picture, I got myself a multi-system (NTSC/PAL) stereo VCR, and a DVD burner (see my review for the later). All I need is a capture device for the video/audio output from the VCR. However, somebody else's whole picture may be different. I remember somebody saying that most digital camcorder has a analogue input so you can capture VHS tapes into DV, the format for digital camcorders. I wish I didn't had one already. The one I got don't have that. I don't think that camcorders 2 years ago has this as a common feature. However, I doubt very much that any of these camcorders will capture both NTSC and PAL.
Lillylovey reviewed a DVD recorder that I didn't thought of. I didn't thought of that a recorder would come down to about $400. However, I should have, since my multi-format DVD burner has fallen down below $300, and driving other single format burner further down. I also didn't realize that a DVD write-once disc can be as low as $0.6! And a rewritable is not much higher. That's a no brainer, a recorder uses exactly as a VCR but use DVD instead of VHS tapes. Sure you can capture all your old tapes. But the problem of a recorder is editing, or the lack of it. If you have money for another burner on you PC, that's perfect. You can take the DVD disc with the video you captured to your PC, edit and then burn. But if your problem is VHS tapes only, this route is overkill because broadcast quality TV is higher resolution than VHS. Again I doubt if these recorders support both NTSC and PAL format.
Alternative capture devices
First I want some card inside my PC. I don't want little light weight boxes like the Instant DVD with lots of wires on. It's awkard to handle. I want the wires to connect to some stable places like going into the back of the PC, front is better of course. My PCI graphics card will not be suitable for playing DVD's and I will have to upgrade to some respectable AGP cards. Natually I spotted the ATI all in wonders, a high performance graphics card, plus TV turner, plus video capture. You can output the video to the TV and computer at the same time. Great! Anything inside the PC will be faster than the USB, and display and capture card in one will be even better. For example, somehow I think you don't need to go through the PC to display what you captured. The added bonus is that I can watch TV and record programs on the PC. It also turn your PC into a TiVo like device. Wow! With this guy plus a DVD burner I have a TiVo or replay TV, DVD recorder, analogue video capture, and high end graphics board. I always know that I have 5 working cable TV outlets in my house. There must be one near my PC. There's one catch. They always say they have NTSC version and PAL version. Not very promising. I researched a lot but I have no answers. As a last resort I send an email to ATI. But surprise surprise, I got answer after a day or 2. They say no, not both NTSC and PAL.
I gave up on internal cards, either the price is not good, resolution is low, or don't support dual system. Next, I want firewire, since I already have a ADS internal card with 2 firewire ports, which came with my camcorder. If there is a firewire capture device, the format will be the same DV format as camcorders and the device itself looks like just another camcorder to the PC. I can do what I do with the camcorder. However, ADS had one but seemed to be discontinued. I may have some answers for this. If you capture DV format onto your hard drive, it's huge compared to Mpeg-2 format used for DVD. You can compress DV to Mpeg-2 on the fly during capture with software. But camcorder is a bit different than a capture device. If somehow something in the capture chain is not fast enough, the camcorder 'playback' could be slowed down if necessary. But for a capture card you can't slow down the source of the video. After I got Instant DVD, I saw DV capture cards around $200, which is good. But I don't know if you can use your PC to compress on the fly to mpeg-2.
Next comes a lot of USB devices. But most are really for turning your old analog camcorder into a web cam, or more usefully, for turning those tiny wireless security cams into wireless web cams. Most USB devices intended for web cams has less than half the resolution of broadcast TV, contributing to those tiny moving pictures typically of the web. By choosing a USB device, I hope that the IDVD is compatible with the Video For Windows standard and so it can be used as a higher end web cam. But it doesn't seem to work that way.
The Instant DVD features
Resolution Resolution Resolution
The most important is resolution. NTSC has 480 horizontal scan lines and PAL has 576. A 4:3 standard TV broadcast ratio gives 640 'vertical lines' for NTSC and 768 vertical lines for PAL. The Instant DVD has only 704 'vertical lines' or horizontal resolution, while others are higher at 720 or above. Is that sufficient? The vertical resoltion must be equal to the number of horizontal scan lines, because this is how the TV signal scan the picture in horizontal lines. You don't get anything more when you have higher vertical resolution. But of course you can throw away some scan lines, say half, yielding those tiny web cam pictures. The horizontal resolution ('vertical lines') is another story. Remember that the signal is analogue, you can sample at more or less at 640 (for NTSC) and 768 (PAL) with different results. But as a guide, if the number of horizontal lines looks OK on TV, the number of digitized vertical lines should be at least close to 640 or 768. The IDVD at only 704 is a bit lacking for PAL, and most other devices are a little bit higher. I think the reason is because ADS limits the size and hence bit rate in order to squeeze into the USB 1.0 specification, which is a bottle neck. New USB spec is better but still can't catch up with firewire.
Back to the question, is 704 sufficient? Strictly speaking, the sampling rate for each vertical lines depends on the signal bandwidth rather than the aspect ratio, i.e., the size of the picture. Hard to tell if you are not in the field. If you look at NTSC DVD's, the software reports a 720 by 480 resolution. I guess a resolution of 720 is better but 702 is not far away. But unless you record TV programs, you don't have 720 horizontal resolution. VHS doesn't look good because the horizontal resolution is less than TV. Another minor factor is your TV. Decent standard resolution TV's with decent size (>32“) is capable of up to 1000 horizontal resolution. So if you do only VHS tapes, a 480x320 resolution may suffice, though if you made a NTSC DVD, the interpolation back to NTSC resolution may take more time if the software support it.
File size and codec
IDVD samples the analogue source and compress it with mpeg-2, and send it through the slow USB (1.0), and the IDVD driver captures it to file. This is promoted as a selling point because otherwise the resulting file will be huge. For 1 hr of VHS, the compressed file is roughly in the 2Gb to 3Gb range. The uncompressed files could easily fill up hard disks.
But I doubt if an mpeg encoder is necessary. Like digital camcorders, a slightly compressed DV format can be sent through a much faster firewire port, and they you can do software compression on the fly before writing it to disk. But don't expect this if you don't have a late model computer.
The IDVD mpeg encoder is of fixed rate type, while efficient codecs has variable rates. I made an NTSC DVD at roughly 2.5 Gb for 1 hr of video. I used the maximum 5 Mb/s capture rate. So a 4.7 Gb DVD disc holds one to two hours of movie which is very reasonable. At $0.6 per DVD-R disc you don't want to squeeze two much home movies into a DVD disc anyway. Those hollywood DVD's with several versions of the movie, say the normal movie, plus the director's cut, and perhaps one with the director's commentary, are larger than 4.7 Gb. Not that the compression is very efficient to fit in one disc, they have two layers on the disc to hold more than a standard 4.7 Gb disc. I think the initial compression rate doesn't matter. You can always expand and recompress it again with better software. I think the Ulead software do this for the final version of the movie, or not. Also, there are software to compress those larger than 4.7 Gb movie to fit in a normal 4.7 Gb disc.
Talking about file size, older windows has size limits like 2 Gb, which is very inconvenient for capturing hours of tapes. If you have a new window that support NTFS, go for it as you don't have problems of file size.
Connections
IDVD supports standard RCA cable (supplied) and S-video cable (not supplied), both for input and output. More, since the IDVD do not digitize sound – it uses your sound card to do it, there are a lot of complications. For other capture devices, you connect video and audio to it and there is only one USB cable connection the device and the PC, where everything goes. For IDVD you have to connect the device to your sound card, and back! And since audio has different types of connectors, the IDVD comes will all sorts of cables with different connectors at different ends. The IDVD is also a digital to analogue convertor, allowing you to send your finished movie to VCR.
Minimum System Requirements
Intel Celeron 500 Mhz or AMD Athlon 600 Mhz
Windows 98 to XP
128 MB memory
Full duplex sound card
16 MB AGP video card
150 MB hard disk space for capture and edit applications
Disk space for video: video captured at 4 Mb/sec will use 1.8 GB per hour
CD or DVD burner for the video
I have Pentium 4 1.8 Ghz, windows XP, 256 MB RDRAM. Integrated sound on mother board, 32 MB AGP video, 40 GB disk drive, and a DVD burner.
The more your system is above the requirement, the safer you are. Since the requirments are not that strigent for todays computer standards, the cost of upgrade is cheap if you need to. But if your system barely meets the minimum requirement at all fronts, and you got problems, you don't know which part of the system is to blame. The bottomline is that video is suppose to be fun. Even with high end computers you need a lot of time to capture the video in real time, edit, recode and record it in tape or burn CD or DVD. If your computer is just above the minimum, that sure will reduce you fun with videos.
The software bundle
Capture Wizard – capture & export utility
USB Instant DVD device drivers
Ulead VideoStudio 6 – Special full version customized for Instant DVD
Sonic MyDVD 3.5
Cyberlink PowerDVD 4.0 – plays DVD disc if you have DVD drive
Neptune MediaShare 3.0
Ulead DVD PictureShow
Quick Time player
Capture Wixard is the bare minimum application that capture video into mpeg-2 files. You can also send the captured file back to analogue video for recording in VCR. VideoStudio is the popularly bundled capture and edit application. You can do everything within VideoStudio, capture, edit, and burn DVDs. MyDVD is similar but the editing function is less, but you can capture and burn DVD directly, saving a lot of time to convert all your VHS libraries. PictureShow is for creating slide show in VCD or DVD.
All of the bundled software are outdated. That's not a real problem if they works. The driver, Capture Wiz and VideoStudio all need upgrading to make it work. The others are OK as they are general applications not directly linked to IDVD. However, the installation CD seems not to have the ability to detect the version of the already installed software such as Quicktime. My Quicktime and Real player got down graded. Not only this, VideoStudio need a lot of 3rd party software, such as Microsoft Direct X, codecs such as Indeo. You have the option to install a long list these things, but it's not simple to lookup the current version of software like Direct X or Indeo codec on your system, if you know what they are. If these things got downgraded, other applications will have trouble.
The problems
The negative reviews on the circuit city website didn't deter me. Most of those problems should have been sorted out before volume production. Otherwise ADS is asking for trouble. I'm right several times, the Apex DVD player, the Epson scanner, the LG cell phone – I never had any problems even with mixed reviews. But to be sure I used large reputable companies, gateway.com, so I can return it just in case. But this time I didn't get the full extend of the problem. After I got it, I found that in the adstech.com site resouces, they link you to a forum with all the problems, some of which are recent purchases.
General problems are related to speed of the computer. It helps to connect directly to the USB port rather than via hubs, and to disable other USB ports when IDVD is capturing. If you capture hour long video, the IDVD may give up half way. The sound and video don't sync up, especially for long captures.
The first attempt I have several problems. For PAL VCR capture using CapWiz, the video window went outside of the boundary where it is suppose to be – you can see how sloppy the software is and the state of the product. On the left edge, the captured image isn't sharp, OK but blurred for NTSC, but could be a huge curve for some part of the tape. On the bottom, you can see that the last scan line flickers for NTSC, and a lot of rubbish flickering at the bottom for PAL. The analogue output of my NTSC digital camcorder is OK though.
I upgraded the driver and Ulead patch from the ADS website before I try to do anything further. The problem is that you have to uninstall the old Capwiz driver first. Then XP will tell you that it found new hardware and ask for CD, but you don't have CD. Somehow I installed the driver that comes with XP, which is probably old, and somehow I tried to install the new driver and the driver was installed. Don't ask me, I didn't remember. For the Ulead patch, it was even worse. You have to register, wait for their auto email to confirm, and tell you where to download free effects (which I don't need at the moment obviously). You install the free effects and then you can install the new patch. Pity that the circuit city price is too bad, otherwise I would have returned it on the way home and you won't hear one more word from me.
Soon after I posted my problems, ADS offer a free new CD to people who purchased the product in the last month. It would be great if I haven't used the old CD. Since I managed to install the patches, I won't want to go through that all again. The old CD is a mess, probably too old. They have a real one player, I agree to install it because I don't which one is newer that I trust that the software will detect that, most will. But it didn't. My real one player and Quicktime got both downgraded. Luckily I didn't trust the CD with other things.
The new Capwiz driver looks much better. I tried to capture video within Ulead and let it run and run. I don't have problems, except one below. The video looks OK. The sound synchronization is perfect, I watch a performance with a huge drum band with huge drums. The drum sounds are precisely in sync with the drum stick in drum solo's. Mouth movement to voice sync is also perfect.
The only one problem is that your end product looks good on normal TV, but not on the computer. This is true for American NTSC tapes and PAL is even worse. I saw announcement on the ADS site that they were working on this but I didn't saw anything that says they sorted it out. I can understand that the problem comes about because analogue TV is sloppy in the time clock accuracy, and VCR tapes are worse. In the analogue world they rely on the sync signal and that doesn't matter to the eyes. Computers are very accurate time keepers and you can't go sloppy with digital samples at Mb/s. However, to sync with the sloppy analogue sync signal, the hardware had to adjust for a huge delay from scan line to scan line. That meant cost to you and me. Also what happens beyond the 480 and 576 scan lines are up to anybody. There you got your data such as TV guide systems. Somehow maybe these sort of things got in the tape, or the VCR can generate any sort of rubbish when nobody should be looking. If you burn the video into CD, SVCD or DVD and play back in your normal TV, everything looks normal.
So the captured video is not suitable to enjoy on any computer. Of course this don't happen in all IDVD boxes I guess, but I can't tell you how widespread it is. My VCR is a JVC multi-system for the far east market. But my VCR type isn't uncommon, almost all PAL VCR's are multi-system, because PAL has 576 lines and can comfortably display the 480 NTSC lines on PAL TV, but not the reverse. One way to get arond this is use software to crop the left and bottom edges, then you get what you see on TV. But unlike photo image, it is not common for software editors to be able to crop the video. There are software that can do that, but that cost you extra. Actually I have a simple solution for watching on computers. View it in full screen, then use the monitor button to shift the image right and down, therefore cropping the video,
The verdict
I kept the box after all because it will convert my VHS tapes, NTSC and PAL, burn DVD and watch them on TV. Indeed the resolution is too good for the tapes as I can see clearly the defects of VHS tapes on DVD. There should be no problems if I ever want to record some TV programs, burn them into rewritable DVD and watch them on TV. I think you can burn direct to DVD saving a lot of time like a VCR recorder but I didn't try. There are better ones at over $200 but I'm not sure that they are problem free. There's too much hazzle to return it. If only I got it from Circuit City.
I paid $148.95 plus tax, no shipping.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
yoshimato
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Location: Beach Cities, CA, USA
Reviews written: 22
Trusted by: 3 members
About Me:
Among other things I reviewed, I also like writing, or more appropriately, being read.
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