Dazzle DVC 80 - Capture cards

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Dazzle DVC 80

Analog VideoIn

Win95 Win98 Win2K WinXP
Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux?
*based on user reports.

USB1

$50

4.3 (4.0)
46 votes

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Description (from the manufacturer site)

Capture Video from a Camcorder, VCR or TV
Connect your Camcorder, VCR or TV to the Dazzle ® Digital Video Creator 80 to capture video to your PC.

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Comments

50 comments, Showing 1 to 25 comments

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When I bought this a few years ago, I was hoping for a quick and easy way to transfer analog tapes into the computer. Although this was the case, the DVC 80 only captures video at a dinky 320x240 resolution, which is about half of the resolution of a DVD. Mind you, with most video tapes this wasn't a big quality difference, but when technology began to advance, this device proved underpowered for good video editing. Now that digital video is the norm, I no longer use it for editing video, however it comes in great handy when connecting my home surveillance camera into the computer for recording.

Comments posted by Eric from United States, September 02, 2007:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 6 of 10.

i bought this new from bestbuy quite a few years ago and could never get it to work. tried it on windows 95,98,2k and ME. i wanted to transfer all of my vhs home videos to digital so i could eventualy put them on dvd. it's just been collecting dust ever since. i have moved a few times since and decided to try it again lol,but the sleeves that had the product keys have been damaged by little sticky fingers. when you try to download it from the site they want money. i can't properly rate the product since i've never been able to get it to capture,but from the majority it seems like junk. i know this is an old thread,but was hoping to find more information before i throw this thing away. have a great day all!

Comments posted by mark from United States, August 17, 2007:
Compatibility: Win95 Win98 Win2K WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 1 of 10.

I have had the dvc 80 4+? years and never was able to use it. Pulled it out of the drawer the other day because I wanted to post some analog video on the internet. Had all the problems people describe but finally got it to work decently with video and sound.

I hooked up my analog vid camera to the dazzle unit only using the video connection. I connected the audio from the camera directly to my lap top. I downloaded the video I wanted using Windows movie maker. It was easy and in a format that I could upload to a web site, whereas using the dazzle format it was a WAV? file and couldnt be uploaded.

Comments posted by mike from United States, February 21, 2007:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 7 of 10.

I have had no of the problems you guys have had. Not one dropped frame and no out of sync problems. I do have a problem getting it to capture the sound but its just a bit of fiddling. I had a serious problem with going back to a porject and trying to edit a second clip from the data but a download to update the drivers and studio sorted that.

On the whole a good product that does what it says on the tin.

Comments posted by griffin from United Kingdom, January 25, 2007:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 8 of 10.

Alot of the problems that I Have seen with this device that I see is commented is caused from using the drivers that come in the box instead of going to the products website and getting the newest driver(www.pinnaclesys.com)side note is that if your using the newer Pinnacle Studio the newer drivers are under the update drivers for the software. Install the driver before plugging it into the USB port. After that run the capture test(both Pinnacle Studio and Ulead have this to optimize capturing, after doing this I had zero capturing problems(this is assuming my source is good)). When all else fails read the manual before installing that leads to well over 90% of the problems seem(I myself made that same mistake when I first got this product and I still use it too).

Comments posted by meccadv10 from United States, July 14, 2006:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98 Win2K WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: No rating.

This piece of crap SUCKS!!! I can bareley fit the wires into it, extremeley fuzzy video, and sound only records for one second! I wish I had never bought this.

Comments posted by James from United States, May 14, 2006:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: No rating.

This is a lot of C**P. I cannot believe the number of dropped frames I get. I have tried it with faster hard drives, 7,200 and 10,000rpm and no luck. I've even got a faster processor. Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish. Don't buy this. Rather get a decent mpeg2 capture card, they're not expensive. Just don't buy this rubbish.

Comments posted by Mario Amorim from United Kingdom, March 17, 2005:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98 Win2K WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 1 of 10.

OK this is the BIGGEST ALL OF s**t Ive have ever bought, I have tried to get this to work on three different pcs/laptops, I am using xp on two pcs and win98 se on the other. My mo/bo is a pc chips k7 fsb400 (usb 2 as well). I have tried every way to get this to work s/video & every other way! I have given up its going back to the shop or the BIN! DO NOT BUY THIS PIECE OF C**P!

Comments posted by Anonymous from United Kingdom, March 09, 2005:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: No rating.

I have had this capturing device for 4 years now. I slowly I am learning all of its strenghts and weakness. Where to hmm, I know for the majority of you that have this device that came packed with the pinnacle quickstart first RTFM. It may not be without flaws but under the new ownership of pinnacle this device has far less flaws then with movie star and videowave. Those with moviestar and videowave I feel your pain.

Now that I have that out of the way lets get started. I found that there are some interesting factors that will cause you video editing hell if left unchecked.

1) Bios, drivers, and windows should all be up to date before starting video editing. Having all of these updated will ensure stability.

2)Having a 5400 RPM Hard drive is not going to cut it.(maybe if this device had mpeg encoding hardware) Do not feel bad alot have made this mistake. This can cause uncompressed video to go out of sync (so can not doing the data test in pinnacle). The 7200 RPM hard drives from western digital and Maxtor works the best. It is even better to get hard drives with 8MB of cache. Two more tips make sure you turn on the dma in windows and defrag the hard drive once a month at least. Another thing if your doing video editing your going to have big files so start with a least 40 or 60 gig available. I'm tired of hearing people complain about file size, if they was that worried they could've $200 dollars for a usb capturing device with hardware mpeg 2 encoding but instead they bought this for $70 at most at least $50.

3)Usb Video capturing can actually be good if people remember the rule of thumb, that the more devices that is connected the motherboard or usb controller card the slower it gets. Bandwidth can equal quality, I have found when capturing with dvc 80 and fusion this can crapple the quality of the video when using usb 1.1. For those of you that is about to say you have usb 2.0 guest what, the way that usb 2.0 is designed it well go back to a usb 1.1 speed bus if even one usb 1.1 device exsist on the bus.

4)Software: When choosing this people sacrifice alot. Easier interfaces can mask other problems. For the plain and simple VDub and the huffy codec works wonders. Other retailed software like ulead video studio and arcsoft showbiz works too. Pinnacle of course is the easiest.

5)Ram, here is a minor down fall for those whom are not techno savy PNY and Crucial gets good results. Configuring the timing helps by cutting down on unnecessary artifacts(ex pixels in high action areas). Buying cheap no name bands can cause stability suffering so it doesnt matter if you a gig of whatever ram that you got for 60 or 100 dollars. What matters if it works correctly with your mobo. Don't get me wrong more ram helps(no less then 256MB).

6)This factor I take to heart when I say this the capture is only as good a the source. First if your coming from a vcr use a panasonic, jvc, or a sony. These had error correcting hardware inside not only for better tracking but better stability in video play back(sorry those $30-$60 dollar vcrs like goldstar, fisher,& broksonic are not going to cut it). People another thing, please stop using those damn string thin A/V cables. I Know they are cheap but for good video editing you need good shielding. This makes sure degrading video does get worse by EMI or RFI.

7)Processors are important for video editing I recommend no less than a 800Mhz P3 or AMD Athlon, you could probably get away with 700Mhz but why give yourself the headache of trying to optimize for that.

These factors are but a few when video editing. When these are actually all considered you can make damn good video with the dvc 80 or the fusion. I would go more in depth but it is getting late.

Comments posted by meccadv10 from United States, April 22, 2004:
Compatibility: ~~Win95~~ Win98 Win2K WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 7 of 10.

Based on many of the previous reviews I think there is a lot of confusion about the Dazzle DVC 80, what it is, and what it is supposed to be used for.

First of all it is not a capture card comparable with other low cost cap cards which produce compressed video. Rather it is an analog to digital bridge or breakout box similar to the DV Hollywood Bridge. I bought it to capture analog video and sound from VHS tapes and satellite reciever. I create raw uncompressed AVI which I then use other tools (such as TMPG) to encode into mpeg-2 for burning on SVCD.
Although I'm still learning how to best do the encoding step, the Dazzle DVC 80 seems to work great for the capture step.

The good thing about it is that when you transfer analog straight to uncompressed video, you have so much more control over every aspect of the encoding process. Cheap capture cards just output a fully compressed mpg which can't really be fixed, modified, or tweaked.

You should know that this is a USB 2.0 device. If you try to plug it into a USB 1.1 port, I don't know what results you will get. Probably won't work at all, or at best it would be excruciatingly slow. USB 2.0 is a connection similar to FireWire and is very very fast. But this means that you have to install a USB 2.0 adapter card in your PC. I got one with 5 ports for about $30, making my entire capture setup cost about $110.

As others have commented, you do seem to get a lot of dropped frames. My first test dropped about 1 in 10 frames. This probably comes from using too high a transfer rate. USB 2.0 is capable of 480 Mbps. To get the fewest dropped frames, you would use 5 Mbps.

Installation in WinXP was absolutely a breeze. XP autodetected the device and installed drivers from the supplied CD without any problems at all.

Sound capture worked fine. Just make sure that you set your capture software to use the DVC 80 for sound capture, rather than your sound card. I used Ulead DVD Workshop to capture, and it allowed me to make all the configuration settings to the cap device that I needed to.

If you try your favorite software to capture and it refuses to communicate with the DVC 80, it's probably because your software only speaks FireWire and doesn't know how to communicate with your USB 2 adapter. For example Adobe Premiere 6.02 only understands Firewire. I don't know about VirtualDub, haven't tested it yet.

I would disregard the bundled software. It has some interesting features, but not enough flexibility for any serious job. There are many better ways to edit and produce VCDs. Besides, it is a crippled version of their full product with several features disabled.

Comments posted by Shard from Other, February 14, 2004:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 8 of 10.

As noticed the DVC80 is mostly crap. I do get sound when capturing with Vegas Video, but no sound with Dr. DivX and my crappy stock sound card has no input jack. Frame drop is awful. Didn't even install the software, just loaded the drivers straight off of the CD. Wish I hadn't wasted $60 on it. *SIGH*

Comments posted by Dr. Rockstarr from United States, February 03, 2004:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 2 of 10.

No install or software problems, but the video quality stinks. Bought it because my old dazzle wouldn't work in XP, no driver for it. Now it is gathering dust in a drawer while I use the software that came with it (Pinnacle Studio 8) to capture with my new Datavideo DAC 100. Finally I have good video!

Comments posted by Janet Smith from Other, January 08, 2004:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 1 of 10.

Bought the unit from best buy.
The video and audio were terribly out of sync.
also the rca receptacles are recessed in such a way that your plugs have to have very thin walls to plug in.
bought a canopus ADVC-100. Can you say happy

Comments posted by Fred Ystebo from Other, December 09, 2003:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 1 of 10.

Is there any further support available for this unit?

Through DAZZLE / SCM site I can't seem to request a serial for the install
disc. There is a 1-800 # for new numbers, but it says there is no more
support, go visit pinnaclesys. Where they seem to want $ for their own
software products.

ice

I think the product is great for a little quick rendering of a VCD/web clip.
Huge negative is that the bundled software (moviestar 5 & the dvd
complete) is slow as molasses and seriously buggy. This is on a P4 with
1 Gig of RAM etc.

Comments posted by icerabbit from Other, December 09, 2003:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 5 of 10.

I bought the Dazzle DVC 80 because I wanted to try to capture some video from my VHS-C Camcorder. Initially, I thought that the product sucked when I was using MovieStar5 to capture the video. I don't know if I had somehow messed up some settings or what, but the video was all blotchy looking, even in the small preview window. I don't want to go into how it looked when I made a VCD!

Anyway, after a week or two of experimenting with it, I came up with the following combination that seems to work ok for me. I am using Ulead Video Studio 6 SE to capture and edit the video. Unfortunately, I can only capture video in AVI format, that I then convert to Mpeg-1. I use Avi2vcd, that I downloaded on this site, works fine. Then I use NTI CD-Maker Gold to make the VCD. The quality doesn't even come close to a DVD, but for what I paid for the unit ($20 after rebates) it is a good entry level unit. Hope this has been helpful.

Comments posted by jlamber1 from Other, September 19, 2003:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 7 of 10.

wow! i dont see how all of you got the bad results. i got FULL QUALITY video off of this little gem. the trick is using Pinacle Studio 8! NO dropped frames. PERFECT audio sync. SUCH LITTLE FILE SIZE!!!
if its just because of my hardware, heres my full specs:
ASUS P4-B533E Motherboard
Pentium 4 2.4 GHz with HT Technology
512 MB PC 2700 RAM
Onboard Surround-Sound (A real joy!)
64 MB ATI Radeon 7500
120 GB Internal Maxtor Hard Drive
60 GB Internal Maxtor Hard Drive
TDK DVD+R/W Burner (420N model. Another joy!)
Onboard USB 2.0 (6 inputs) and Firewire (1 4-pin input and 1 6-pin input)
Onboard SPDIF and Optical Inputs
staudio ADC&DAC2000 Audio Processing Board (Has 10 audio imputs!)

I really only use it for taping shows and then cutting out the commercials and putting them on DVD. I'm only using the Pinacle Studios 8 SE that came with my DVD burner, which is a slimmed-down version of Pinacle Studios 8. Seems to work great!!!

Final word: USE PINACLE STUDIOS 8!!!

Comments posted by Cole Montgomery from Other, August 03, 2003:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 10 of 10.

Only good for doing vcd, not dvd. Taking it back tomorrow.

Comments posted by Anonymous from Other, July 06, 2003:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 2 of 10.

Bought this card 4 weeks ago and find it great. Does exactly what it says on the box. Some problems with audio/video sync which were cured by downloading update to Moviestar 5 from Dazzle website, and reducing graphics acceleration.
Support from website seems good. I am now using it with Video Studio 7 which has more features. The only downside to the DVC 80 is the large AVI files it produces and the 4 Gig file size limit in Win 98. I would certainly recommend DVC 80 for budget editing. Saved me having to buy a digicam to replace my analogue Sony.

Previously had Hauppage Win TV usb which was crap.
System:
800 celeron
192 m memory
20 gig h/disk
Win 98 SE
Can produce very acceptable svcds

Comments posted by Keith Miller from Other, July 05, 2003:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98 Win2K? WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 8 of 10.

Unlike many complaints this capture worked great. The quality was somewhat improved from vhs in that the color bleeding was taken out by adjusting the contrast and such. The sound inputs worked great for me as well. I am using a machine I built with 1ghz processor and 256 megs ram. My only complaint is the size of the files it rips... small issue that a 60 gig hard drive worked good for.

Comments posted by Dan S from Other, January 12, 2003:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 8 of 10.

Here's what I can say about DVC80:
Tech Support is very BAD. Have to wait forever or Pay extra cash and still wait forever. Missing Serial Number to install bundled software. Have to go to Dazzle Site to search. Capture Format (AVI) is huge. Runs OK in my XPPro. I used Windows Movie Maker to capture at WMV format (smaller file size! thanks uncle bill!). Movie Maker automatically captured the hardware automatically.

Question: Can Nero burn WMV into VCD?
If yes, then this piece of crap is worth the price.

Comments posted by Casper from Other, December 17, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: No rating.

This is a piece of junk, with terrible included software. The quality of the captured video and audio is awful.

Comments posted by Albert Fall from Other, December 04, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98 Win2K WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 1 of 10.

Well I seem to be in the minority here but the Dazzle 80 worked perfectly. The software and all updates were installed, computer rebooted, and device plugged in. It was recognized and the drivers attached. First capture had audio sync problems, so I turned off graphic hardware acceleration and the sync problem was fixed. Considering I paid only $29 at BestBuys and the limitations of the card (VCD quality only), it was a great deal. Using Win98SE on a PIII 667.

Comments posted by WPS from Other, November 30, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98 Win2K? WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 8 of 10.

I spent three weeks reading forums, downloading patches, tweaking this and that, and losing sleep trying anything and everything to get this device to capture more frames than it dropped using my new WinXP computer, 1.2 ghz, 60 gig hd (which was zero fragmented BTW). I tried every software I could get my hands on from VirtualDub to Movie Star 5.

The best I got was a horrid looking VCD that had the audio way out of sync. All that hard work for nothing.

I took it back to BestBuy, got my money back, and bought a Canopus AVDC-100. So no more capturing problems of any kind whatsoever. NOW, I'm finally having FUN.

Comments posted by Redeye from Other, November 06, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 1 of 10.

I had a Dazzle Fusion(DVC80?)It Does not do what the box advertises. Seems to be poor quality. Every thing i capture (to avi/ edit in movie star/ produce to svcd) looks very bad after editing and burning. Off of Dazzle forum i was told to render (encode?) without editing. After capturing in movie star, then encoding from avi to mpeg-2 through tmpge, then burn through U-lead software gave the best results(almost acceptable). Viewing other vcd`s (not svcd`s) other vcd`s have much better quality. SO I used my 14 day trial(using all resorces possible)took it back to circuit city. Dazzle Tech support is not found (unless you have enough money)!! Also The Memory stick reader did not work on the unit either. I did not have enough time to investigate.

Comments posted by Robert from Other, November 03, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 2 of 10.

Follow up the previous comment (please scroll down the comments),

From someone's suggestion, I am going to try the Dazzle Movie Star 5. He claimed that you will see no drop when capturing. I will be extremely interested to see that.

Currently I am trying to identify a strange problem in the capturing performance.

Currently I am using ULead DVD Express (probably not the name, you get the idea which application I am talking about).
And I used the default MPEG settings for the capturing.

2 weeks ago, I can capture the one-hour program with less than 3% of dropped frames.

Lately I found that the frame drop rate increased to more than 5% for the same settings.

The only significant differences I can think of is I did disk defrag last week and didn't finish the whole thing. And, I added a UPS with USB connection to a seperate USB port on the motherboard, W2K did ask me to reinstall all USB devices.

And, regarding to the crappy audio, I switched the audio input to my sound card's line in. I am not seeing audio sync problem in this approach.

So, summarize the whole thing, if you want to make this sucker work, you can use these methods,

1. VirtualDub, video codec: Huffman(you can find that in the tools section of this web site). Audio codec: CD quality PCM. This will give you around 15GB of raw data from around one-hour input video. If you have large hard disks, do this.

2. ULead solutions, use the MPEG1-default setting for the capturing. Twick the settings to get the most reasonable result that you like. For me, this will give you around 1GB of MPEG1 data from the same one-hour video. If you are not seeing many dropped frames and you have a faster machine, do this.

3. Dazzle MovieStar solution, under investigation....

Well, it's cheap, and you probably need to be more capable in some related areas to make this thing work for ya.

For the other capturing needs, IEEE 1394 DV path is used in my system.

I NEED A CHEAP REAL-TIME DivX 5 CAPTURE CARD!!!

Comments posted by dayuantung from Other, October 31, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 1 of 10.

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Feature
What kind of main capture features it supports
Analog VideoIn = Analog composite or/and SVHS video input
Video Card = If it is a Video Card/Graphic Card
Tv Tuner = Built-In TV-Tuner
Digital TV = Built-In Digital TV-Tuner
DV/Firewire = DV/Firewire/i.Link input
DV Converter = Analog composite or/and SVHS video input and converts to DV video
MPEG1 hardware = Capture directly MPEG1(VCD) video using hardware*
MPEG2 hardware = Capture directly MPEG2(SVCD and DVD) video using hardware*
MJPEG hardware = Capture directly to MJPEG using hardware*
MPEG4 hardware = Capture directly to MPEG4(DivX,Xvid) video using hardware*
* = Most capture cards can capture to this format using software but it usually requires a very fast computer, if it supports realtime capturing it uses the capture cards hardware and it doesn't require a very fast computer and you may get better quality but less options/settings than software capturing.

Compatibility
What Operating System our users have reported that it works on, Win95=Works ~~Win95~~=Does not work Win95?=Not tested This is user based.

Cnx = Connection
What type of connection the capture device has to the computer, PCI, AGP, USB1/1.1/2, DV or PCMCIA.

Price
The price in US dollar.

Rating
The first rating is based on a weighted rank (the true Bayesian), it requires at least 5 votes to get a weighted rating.
The second rating between the ( ) is a normal average rating.

Comment
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