ATI's Best: All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 128MB & TV/Capture Card Roundup

MSI's G3Ti500 Pro-VT

In the past, the only way of getting video capture support on a NVIDIA card was if you purchased an ASUS card. ASUS was the first to truly bring VIVO (Video In/Video Out) functionality to NVIDIA cards and that's what they became known for with their Deluxe line of cards. With the release of NVIDIA's Personal Cinema ASUS' forte has been encroached upon but they, along with a handful of other manufacturers, continue to bring basic VIVO support down to their cards.

These cards do not feature any sort of PVR functionality as they all lack a TV tuner, so if you are looking for a Tivo replacement or a way to watch TV on your PC then you'll want to look elsewhere. What they do feature however is the very same Philips video encoding chip that's present on Personal Cinema bundled cards giving these cards the same capture quality as a Personal Cinema setup.

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From our last GeForce3 Titanium Roundup we picked out the MSI G3Ti500 Pro-VT which features this Philips video encoding chip as well as the same software bundle as the Gainward VIVO card in that roundup.

The benefit of the VIVO setup on these cards is that you don't need any breakout boxes or even any dongles. The MSI card for example only features three video ports on the card itself which is all it needs; for outputs you're given a s-video and composite out and then one s-video input. All audio outputs/inputs are handled by your sound card as usual but you don't need to connect an audio output from the MSI card to your sound card as there's no TV tuner to need such an arrangement.

WinCoder 1.5

As you can expect, the software for these cards isn't developed in house by the manufacturers instead they license WinCoder and WinProducer from InterVideo (the makers of WinDVD/WinDVR used with the Personal Cinema). As the name implies, WinCoder takes an external input and encodes it into either a MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 file. There is also an MPEG transcoding option that lets you convert an AVI to an MPEG file.

There's not much more to say about WinCoder except that it does its job and offers the following encoding resolution options: 160x120, 176x144, 320x240, 352x240, 352x288, 352x480, 640x240, 720x288, 640x480, 720x480. The MSI card came bundled with WinCoder version 1.5.