Gainward GeForce4 Ti 4200: The First Retail 4200

VIVO Functionality at a Low Price

Because of the low cost of implementation of the Philips encoder chip, many manufacturers choose to implement it to bring video capture to their cards. While you shouldn't expect All-in-Wonder class functionality out of it, it's more than enough for getting analog video captured onto your PC.

We have covered the Philips encoder and the WinCoder/WinProducer software bundle in great detail in our latest video capture roundup. Here is an excerpt from that roundup that applies to the Gainward card as well as the MSI card used in the roundup:

Unlike the MSI card we used in the video capture roundup, the Gainward Ti 4200 uses a simple dongle to allow for composite/s-video inputs and outputs.

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 Gainward card came bundled with WinCoder version 1.5.

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Continuing on with descriptive names we have WinProducer which plays the same role as Ulead's VideoStudio and MGI's VideoWave. WinProducer is clearly the least capable out of the three video editing packages mentioned here as it lacks the same effects and manipulation options offered by the other solutions. The goal of these VIVO cards is to allow you to get video from your camcorder or some other source onto your PC and you shouldn't expect much more outside of that. The Gainward card was bundled with WinProducer 1.0 SE.

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In the end these VIVO cards are a very simple way (and relatively inexpensive compared to the other options) of getting video on your PC. You won't find any remotes, no TV tuning options and definitely no other frills other than a couple of inputs to capture video. If you have a DV camera you're better off buying a bare video card and picking up a cheap Firewire adapter for true digital video editing, otherwise VIVO cards like the Gainward still have their place in spite of the introduction of NVIDIA's Personal Cinema.