Belkin F5U228 HiSpeed USB 2.0 DVD Creator
Value For Money
Belkin F5U228 HiSpeed USB 2.0 DVD Creator
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User Reviews
Value For Money
I Bought This For A Friend, I Was So Impressed Wit
I bought this for a friend, I was so impressed with the picture quality I kept it for myself, it was better than any TVcard I've ever installed (I've been building PC's professionally for over 10 years)
it will capture at 720x576@25fps in DVD-PAL mode.
personally I don't use the software that comes with it. Plug it in and when windows asks for the drivers, point it to the driver folder on the CD. Then use AmCap or VirtualDub (both are free) to capture at 720x576@25fps using Xvid/mp3 codecs.
I forgot to mention - I didn't get any dropped frames at all in my test captures which were at 720x576@25fps. The machine i used was an old 2Ghz AMD PC with a gig of ram running XP+SP2 (running XP with less than 1Gb of ram is going to have problems the moment you ask it to do anything other than simple tasks). All my drives have at least 8Mb cache as opposed to the standard 2Mb cache (they cost about £8 more than normal but have improved performance).
Value For Money
I Was Hoping To Use This Device To Transfer My Age
I was hoping to use this device to transfer my ageing collection of VHS tapes to DVD. Its specs imply that it should have no trouble doing it on my 1.7GHz PC running Windoze XP SP2 with 768MB of RAM.The first problems I had was no colour in the preview window and no sound. After a lot of wasted time, I finally found the NTSC/PAL selection option hidden in a sub-menu called "Image" and correctly set it for PAL (it defaults to NTSC) to restore the colour. After more wasted time, I discovered that the old Ulead software was confusing my sound card so that muting the line input in 'play' mode was also muting it for recording.After all that, I tried doing some video encoding. It soon became obvious that there was no way it was ever going to produce DVD resolution transfers. CPU usage was peaking at 100% and producing dropped frames at all resolutions above about 352x240.I even went as far as re-installing the motherboard chipset drivers in case this was the reason for the poor performance. My hard drive's a new 7200RPM Seagate, which should not cause any problems.Also the Ulead software has a fatal flaw - if you bring up another window (e.g. Task Manager) while it's running, it's impossible to clear that window which from then on obscures all the Ulead buttons so you have no control over the program. That was the last straw for me.Overall I'm very disappointed with this device and its software. I'm going to take it back and get a refund.
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