Video capture cards on old laptop

Jamp

Hi All

I've got some video8 tapes I want to digitise and archive onto DVD. I'm hoping to borrow an old camcorder to play these, and a mate of mine recommends a Pinnacle Dazzle USB video capture card. There are much cheaper ones of these on Amazon/eBay but he reckons these are less good compatibility wise, and I don't have time to mess around as I want the DVDs done for xmas presents!

This should work ok but the stumbling block is I'm away from home and only have my laptop to use for this. This is a Dell Latitude D610 with Intel Centrino 1.6GHz, 2GB RAM, Intel 915 integrated gfx, Win XP.

The Pinnacle Dazzle says it needs the following:
# Intel® Pentium® or AMD® Athlon™ 1.4 GHz or higher (2.4 GHz or higher recommended)
# 512 MB RAM (1 GB recommended)
# DirectX® 9 or higher compatible graphics card with 64 MB (ATI® Radeon® or NVIDIA® GeForce™ 3 or higher, with 128 MB recommended)
# DirectX 9 or higher compatible sound card (Creative® Audigy® or M-Audio® recommended)

I'm pretty close to the limits there I think, particularly on the gfx, don't know how much RAM is allocated to gfx (how do I check?)

Does anyone have any experience of this and have any thoughts on how I'll get on given being close to the spec limits? Would I be better off using a set-top DVD recorder, bringing those into the PC to edit, then burning my final DVDs? Or just paying the man in the yellow pages?

Donnie

I would go the set top DVD recorder route. At least it's still useful when you've done.

As to the information you require: Dynamic Video Memory Technology (DVMT) 3.0 supports up to 128MB of video memory; system memory is allocated where it is needed dynamically.

If you make sure that nothing else is running on the laptop whilst you are doing the transcode, it may be ok.

Otherwise; Toshiba DR18DT £78.24 or Philips DVDR 3480 £51.90 but only 60 day warranty. May be best to look at a product that will have some future use.

Freeview will soon be upgraded to HD, so think about that if you are thinking of buying a machine for it's Freeview component.

financequest

I use a Pinnacle Video transfer box, typically £75. You only need a USB stick to record the output as MP4 files. These can then be opened on your laptop with no problem. Youtube demo ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q0J0o7HhRc. Absolute magical device, size 11X6X2 cm.