A Good Value Analog to DV Converter?

Question

I'm looking for an affordable and powerful analog to DV converter. I saw the one at ElGato, the EyeTV 200, but that also has a TV tuner in it which jacks up the price a bit. Then I looked at the Canopus ADVC100 which is sold in Apple's Online Store. Are either of these good choices? Keep in mind that I need something that imports both composite and s-video through a high-speed port (FireWire 400 or 800 or USB 2).

Answer 1

I've got an eyetv 200
it works well, so far i've captured about 200gb of video (i'm archiving lots of old tapes), absolutely no problems so far
it has composite and s-video, as well as a tuner
the capture quality is fine, it handles video from marginal tapes better than my tv
it hardware encodes direct to mpeg-2, so for going direct to dvd (via toast) this is great as there's no lengthy encoding needed
but you've said you want analogue to dv, the eyetv goes straight to mpeg-2, it can export this as dv, but the initial compression step will have lost some information, and assuming you want to subsequently go dv->mpeg-2 then there'll be another quality hit there
you can reduce the impact of this by upping the capture bit-rate, the maximum is 6.8gb/hr, about 3 times higher than a normal dvd
the software has been flawless, a few more editing features would be handy, and that's really my only (mild) gripe
but imho if you want to do much editing/authoring, rather than simply converting old videos to store on dvd, or using it as a tivo-type device, then you'd be better off getting a unit that goes direct to dv without any compression