There are better products available
Written: Feb 14 '04
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: The card does work
Cons: Software bundle is of poor quality & poor tech support
The Bottom Line: Do not buy this product. Because when tech support was notified about the major flaw their reply was basiclly "live with it."
|
|
|
| daledavidson's Full Review: KWorld DV/AV Expert (VS-883DV-PRO) TV Input |
I bought the Kworld VS883DV/AV-Pro in the middle of January 2004. I have searched extensively on the Internet for reviews and could find none. I wish I had. Hopefully those of you who read this would be spared the problems I have had.
The card itself seems to work fine in my computer. Kworld recommended a minimum of 700mhz PIII. I believe this is wildly optimistic if you want to capture in anything but low bit rate mpeg1 files. The real-time mpeg1 & 2 encoding is done in software. A 2gig P4 machine is the minimum I would recommend for mpeg 2 at medium resolution and bit rates.
The bundled software is the largest problem with this product. The card comes with Cyberlink PowerDirector 2.55 and Power VCR ll. Power Director claims to require a Pll 450 or above, however when capturing at VHS tapes at 480x480 mpeg2 capture was jerky and the sound distorted. Taskmaster showed CPU usage at 100%. Clearly my 1.3 Celeron Plll was underpowered for the task Using the Power VCR software I was able to at 320X480 mpeg 2 and use Power Director to convert to DVD type of files.
The biggest hurdle I have come across however came when authoring DVDs. I was unable to use more than 70% of the available disk space. I wanted to burn a 3.6 gig mpeg file. The program popped up an error message telling me my files were too big and to reduce file size. I contacted tech support in Taiwan and 2 days later they got back to me with this reply.
“Thank you for contacting CyberLink Online Support. This problem is caused by PowerDirector 2.55 used the new estimation mechanism audio size (LPCM) after transcoding, therefore if your recording size is too big (near 4GB), then PDR 2.55 authoring and burning the DVD what you make may happen this problem. Now the only way is to minimize your project size then you can avoid the issue. The safe way is to record about 3/4 size of your DVD Disc size = 3.3 GB. If you've got any further issue, please feel free to contact us. Thank you and best regards”
Unfortunately they will not reply further to me about this or any other questions.
In summation: I do not recommend this product, largely because of the poor quality of the software bundle.
I have downloaded trial versions of TMPGEnc DVD Author and Ulead Video Studio 7. These have worked fine I would recommend them.
Recommended:
No
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
daledavidson
|
|
Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.