|
|
Clearly designed as a Swiss Army knife of video cards, the Marvel is stocked to the rafters with Video in/out features, most of which course through the oblong blue Connector Box. This breakout unit keeps all of those messy RCA and SVHS connectors away from the back of your PC, just as it keeps you off your knees whenever you need to swap in a new video source. It links to the video card itself via a very sturdy cable about the size of a baby boa constrictor, which carries the video signals to and fro as well as audio in and out links to your sound card. All of the connections to and from video sources/recorders reside on the remote breakout box.
Basic video quality from the TV tuner is as good or better than the any standalone card I have seen. Color fidelity is fine and color bleeding is minimal. The sharpness is also quite good. The underlying tuner software is superb, and this is an area where many tuner suppliers fall far short. Like most, Matrox uses a remote control metaphor for punching up channels, changing inputs, etc., but the options beneath it have video capture fans in mind. Screen caps can be handled by assigned hot-keys and sent to incrementally numbered images files in BMP or JPG formats. It amazes me how many TV tuner products overlook these obvious conveniences. Even JPG quality is adjustable. Moreover, the Marvel does a better job of freezing action in screen grabs than other tuners, which usually leave telltale scan lines (the combing effect) at the edge of moving images. The channel changer operations are fine, scanning and logging the 124 channel range, though you won't get the multiple screens of video preview/scanning, which w
e've seen elsewhere. Now in its third generation, the software works mostly smoothly. However one hardware oddity about Matrox tuners continues to befuddle me. Shutting down the video tuner software successfully cuts any sound feed along with the picture coming from a coaxial cable but it doesn't cut the sound from RCA inputs, which run sound into your audio card's line in jack. The picture shuts down but the sound keeps going unless you turn off the source.
Even more robust are the video capture options. The Marvel has a built-in MJPEG encoder/decoder, which supplies optional video compression ratios between about 4:1 and 10:1, allowing you to squeeze lengthy video streams into relatively small disk space without extreme amounts of CPU usage. I recorded a 40 second clip from VHS at 640x480, quite large for vidcapping, and kept it to 14.4MB. Even at that high a resolution, the video quality was excellent with no dropped frames and no video burps on my admittedly hearty testbed system (P3-500 with a 7500 RPM IBM Ultra-DMA hard drive). Capturing in gray-scale and varied color-depths is available as well. Even at the highest compression ratio and smaller resolutions, the results were remarkably free of digitized blockiness. For consumer-level video capturing, no greater level of flexibility and quality is available at this price. And amateur web hosts who yearn to post some streaming video online will find no better starter set than the Marvel.
|
|
|