What 4 channel video caputure card?

I’m working on a project on which I need four video streams to be captured at the same time.
First I bought a cheapo survailance card (kodicom).
This card has four bt chips onboard an work ok with the btwincap drivers. But the quality is like the price: not so much…

Then I bought a Videum capture card from winnov.
I had a lot of trouble with that card’s drivers.
After a lot of debugging I found out the drivers won’t work with my Nvidea GPU.
Also the card can’t capture 4 full pal streams at 25fps at once. The PCI bus seems to overload…

I already spend a lot of money on capture cards and still have not found one that pleases me.

So: what is the best card I could get?
One which works with vvvv and my Nvidea GPU!

i think its possible to plug multiple Hauppauge ImpactVCB into one computer. but you will need a really fast computer to capture four streams at once, and i personally havent seen that running with 25fps

did you investigate Video Quad Splits (used in surveillance applications) which put four video signals into one by scaling them by 50%.

You could try the dfg1394, split over 2 firewire busses, but I think you’ll get saturation again, I think Full Pal, you can only really do 3 streams, maybe 2 separate cards will help. I’ve used a spectra8 card and done 4 streams of 720x288 ie loose a field, which works ok, quality isn’t pristeen but ok, and used quad splits as described, which is ok but half size again, but did mean I had 8 ins…

For as far as I can see the ImpactVCB has only one bt878 chip so it will be possible to capture only one stream at 25fps at the time.
Maybe it’s possible to put more than one card in a pc but in my case it would take four pci slot’s which I don’t have.

Compressing four signals in one would be a desaster for the quality. And is no option for me.
I need at least 720x576 (PAL)

I’ll have a look at the spectra8 cards tonight…

Thanks so far!

I’d say one of the best solution for this atm is a solution by nvidia, here- i haven’t tried it, but it claims to be able to stream up to 4 hd signals directly to your graphics processors with little latency- however, the new quadro fx card you’ll need for this start at 700 euros, the capture card itself is about 2k+ - at least the price i’m able to find. don’t know if this helps :)

… used this one some years ago … worked better than most other cards i tried
winnov videum 4400

markus

You should have a look at Matrox cards as well. Not sure if its a closed stream through card - aka no way to manipulate video - but take a look at this.