Looking for High End Free to Air PCI or PCIe card

[dwboston]

We're in the market for a professional quality capture card. We are a broadcast production house that has been capturing MPEG2/DVB video from a free to air channel on the AMC-1 satellite for a broadcast client. Currently we capture everything directly into Final Cut Pro on a Macintosh computer using an AJA Kona card that can connect to the SDI port of a PowerVU receiver. However, even using the highest setting on the system, we are not happy with the quality of the capture.

From what I understand using a PCI card for a Windows PC would allow us to avoid any decoding or re-encoding since the satellite feed is in MPEG-2 format and the card's function is to simply create a file out of that MPEG-2 stream.

We're looking for a high end card (cost not an issue here). From what I understand there are two types of cards --- ones that require the computer to do most of the heavy lifting, and another that has hardware on board the card to do much of the processing. We have not purchased the Windows PC yet, (can you tell we are a Mac operation?) so we can tailor the needs of the card to whatever PC we purchase.

One other note, we use a fixed c-band dish and only downlink the one feed from a transponder on AMC-1, so don't need any bells and whistles that control the dish or search for channels.

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

[pendragon]

If all you're doing is recording the transport stream, modern DVB-S2 cards will do all the heavy lifting in terms of processing. The only time a PC has much work to do is when the transport stream is rendered, and much of that work can be offloaded to modern video cards. In terms of a card recommendation, the current generation Prof cards (PCI - 7301, PCIe - 8000) provide as good or better real world and measured performance as anything out there. Their drivers are simple and reliable. You can get them at Rick's Satellite for $100 or less.