I have a nVidia GeForce4 MX4000 64MB, with what is called "TvOut".

Question 1: What purpose does the "S-Video" port in the card serve? Is
this for *sending* video from the computer to an external DVD or VHS
recorder for example?

Question 2: Any suggestions for a basic video card that will allow me to
*import* video from a camcorder or VCR for instance - to burn to DVD? (I
have a DVD-Burner and appropriate software).

BTW, I'm not doing any gaming or other intense video operations. For
video in operations, are these external boxes that hook up via USB any good?

TIA

Show quote Hide quote IN response to your first question, yes this port is to send video out
through the S video port.  As far as importing video, you don't necessarily
need a video card.

Lol guess I should read the WHOLE post first eh?

I have used those import tools from USB and yes they work very well.  I have
only ever used the products by dazzle though.  If you have the ports, I
would recommend getting the USB 2 or firewire revision if you can.

-Chris

I can't answer your question on "S-Video", because I've never used it.
As for transferring video from your camcorder to the PC, I have experience
with that.
I bought a camcorder two months ago and was using USB-2 for transferring
and the video quality was poor and I was pretty upset.  Almost everyone said
I should
use Firewire instead.  So I bought a Firewire card and it made all the
difference in
the world.  My Sony camcorder came with the Firewire cable.
I use Windows Movie Maker and save my video to a DV-AVI format. Send that
file to your DVD burner for best results or to a VCD for good results.

Hope this helps you...
Roln



"R.K. McSwain"  wrote in message
Show quoteHide quote

R.K. McSwain wrote:
Show quoteHide quoteS-Video can be used to output to TV for playing DVDs and so forth.

J.

On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 16:42:50 GMT, "R.K. McSwain"
<n**@autodesk.com> wrote:

S-VIdeo is an output, so yes you can use the S-Video out (or
an adapter) to send video to a VCR, TV, another computer
that has S-Video in, etc.


If your camcorder has a firewire port, that is the best
option for it.  Camcorders record to a compressed format
already so when the firewire port is used, it's not
technically a video "capture" anymore, rather a file-copy
operation.  As such, there is no realtime need for a certain
performance level to prevent dropped frames, and not having
to recompress the video being captured, AS it's being
transferred to the PC, results in less quality degradation
and further reduction in PC resources to do it.

Otherwise, some people like external USB boxes for realtime
capturing, like from a VCR or other device with a
pseudo-live video signal (as it plays/outputs whatever) but
it is important to have USB2 support for best quality.  Some
quality is still lost though, the best solution for realtime
input is a PCI video capture card, which will have S-Video
inputs among others.... some  might have digital like a
firewire or a TV and/or FM tuner too... but for the  basic
transfer from the VCR it would only need have the S-Video
input (plus the adapter than typically comes with such
capture cards if the VCR didn't have S-Video output).


They are convenient more than anything else.  They cannot
produce the same quality nor be as versatile.  They also
can't (with very rare exceptions) capture to anything but a
pre-compressed MPEG1/2 which isn't what someone who's going
to be doing much editing would want.  Video capture is a
topic far exceeding the scope of this newsgroup, you might
want to Google search for the video capture related web
forums.

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