Hi there,

I recently bought a WinTV PVR-350 card after reading great reviews.
I can honestly tell you the video capture quality is sub-standard.

Here's what I require the card to do:
Capture video from a Sky+ (i.e. Tivo) box
Capture video from a Laserdisc player.
Capture video from an S-VHS player

MPEG-2, MPEG-4, avi
I believe 1hr = 2GB - and I am happy with that.
I will be writing them to dvd ultimately and I may possibly compress the odd file down to DivX or XviD format (to save on space) - but not always.

I've been told that I will have to expect some loss of quality as I am restricted to analogue feeds to and from each source. Is this 100% true?
I've been told I cold capture it raw - It would be the best quality but, would take ages. True?

S, what are my choices?
Not sure the Pinnacle cards are up to scratch.
ATI ALL-IN-WONDER® 9800 Radeon PRO isn't very pro either.
Most people describe it as being "less than vhs".
So, unless you can tell me better, it looks like my only option is buying a
Matrox RTX-100 Extreme Pro?

I am really fussy about picture quality and i won't 'make do'.
I understand the limitations of S-Video and Scart connections.
All I want is to, at the very least retain the quality even if i have to capture it raw.
Perhaps there is a card for professional video labs that can cover quality and all manner of inputs & outputs?

The outputs from my Sky+ box are:
RF Out
VCR Scart (apparently, for transferring to VHS/or SVHS *lol*)
TV Scart (for viewing on TV)
S-Video Out
RCA Audio Out (L&R)
Optical Audio Out

To my amazement, there doesn't appear to be one video capture card that has a 'digital audio in' (optical or coaxial). Is this true? I don't like the idea of running it through the soundcard only to find sync problems later - unless this isn't a problem?

Is 10bit the best video capture rate available?
Is there a card that will capture at up to HDTV resolutions? (less important)

Anyway, my PC specs are as follows:
Intel 875P chipset
3.0GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor with HT technology and 800Mhz front side bus
Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional operating system (I did try running Media Center Edition 2004 but I kept getting a video error)
500GB Serial ATA RAID 0 Stripe [2x250GB 7200rpm drives with DataBurstTM cache]
2x512MB Dual Channel 400MHz DDR Memory
8 USB 2.0 ports, 4 PCI slots and AGP 8x slot
128MB ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Graphics Card with DVI Dual Monitor Support and TV - Out via S-Video

Hope somone can help

Thanks in advance,
D