At a penny under £50 (inc VAT), Terratec’s Grabster AV 150 external USB 2.0 box looks like something of a no-brainer for anyone wanting to convert their analogue tapes to DVDs or VideoCDs.
With sockets for composite and S-video, the USB-powered box caters for most types of domestic analogue VCR and camcorder footage - VHS, S-VHS, VHS-C, S-VHS-C, Digital8 and Hi8 - and should even be usable with Betamax machines. And, of course, if you've got a satellite receiver or a digital camcorder with composite or S-video outputs, it should be able to handle them, too.
That keen price - which even buys a full copy of Ulead's capable and easy-to-use authoring program DVD MovieFactory 3 plus a lite (SE) version of Ulead's VideoStudio editing app - is partly explained by the fact that encoding is carried out in software within the PC, not by hardware within the Terratec box.
So, the creation of MPEG-2 (for DVDs), happening in software, requires a reasonable-spec machine with either an Intel P4 1400MHz CPU or an AMD Athlon 1800+ and, ideally, at least 512MB RAM. In contrast, VCD-creation is only said to need an 800MHz CPU and 256MB RAM but it's not clear what's required for SVCD, which uses MPEG-2 at a lower data rate than DVD.
Another factor in keeping down the price is that, while video goes through the box, sound is fed in via the PC's own sound card. This separate routing of sound and video isn't ideal, though. You'll be depending on WinXP's ability to keep in synch the video coming in via the Terratec box with the audio coming in via the PC's own sound card.
Ulead's DVD MovieFactory authoring and burning program is now up to V4 but the Terratec-provided V3 can, we know, still do the business. It's easy to use and has no shortage of features - titling, menu designs, photo backgrounds, additional audio and the ability to import non-copy-protected MPEG-2 video from DVD-RAM, DVD-RW or DVD+RW set-top recorders - though, again, a decent PC will be required to handle MPEG-2 in comfort. VideoStudio 7SE is a competent enough video editing program and also not to be sniffed at even though the latest iteration is V9.
HEXUS.links
Grabster AV 150 press release
TerraTec UK- http://www.terratec.co.uk
HEXUS.community discussion thread
EuroTech (UK disti) - Tel: 0870 458 4891; email sales@euro-tech.co.uk.
