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I bought my Miro DC10 video capture card about 10 years ago. It came with crappy software so I tossed it in a corner for a long time. Then, much later, Pinnacle bought Miro and created the Studio program. They also updated the driver so now the board was recognized as a DC10Plus and supported full interlaced PAL (and NTSC but I was living in PAL land at the time). I liked the Studio software a lot and after a few updates to version 1.10 it was extremely stable and did pretty much everything I wanted to do with it: it even captured to multiple AVI's without dropping frames. There were a couple of minor flaws, e.g. when editing you still had to work with the separate AVI's, and there was no way to split audio and video, to do "insert" shots, but I didn't really mind too much.
I also purchased the Studio DV version which didn't capture to multiple AVI's but because it's a digital capture and the source material on my DV camcorder is rarely over 21 uninterrupted minutes, this was no big deal either. I hacked my PAL camcorder so I could write the video back (European camcorders are crippled so they can't record from DV because of import restrictions), and then used the program not only as editing tool but also as a way to make digital backups of my camcorder tapes. Cool!
But when I wanted to upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows XP, I had a problem: the old VFW drivers are no longer supported by Windows, and so Studio 1.10 didn't work anymore. I took the step of getting the demo version of Studio 7 which you can't download - it gets sent to you on CD (stupid marketing if you ask me). The program crashed a couple of times so I decided not to purchase the $59 update (normal price is $99 for the software alone).
When I got my DVD recorder, it included the SE (Special Edition) version 8.5.21.0 (a whole mouthful), and I was hoping that this version would be more stable but alas. Various times the program crashed during capture, or - even worse - during editing, so I had to start all over again. Maybe my hardware is to blame (800MHz Athlon, 256MB RAM, 60GB Western Digital ATA100 drive, Radeon 64MB DDR VIVO video card) but I never have any other problems with it.
All in all the program is nice for simple projects like capturing a TV show and putting it on (S)VCD or DVD (by the way the built-in encoder has always been reeeeeeealllly slow so usually I use VirtualDub and other tools for that), but if you're doing anything complicated, it's not worth the money because having the program crash at random intervals is no fun, even though it DOES save your project automatically at regular intervals. Pinnacle has been adding lots of cool features and effects that I never use, but they should concentrate more on getting some bugs out.
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