Terratec Grabster AV150 Allentown PA

Rating: 6/10

The Terratec Grabster AV150 is one of the smallest video capture devices I've seen, measuring just 90 x 65 x 20mm it's not much bigger than a cigarette packet. This USB 2.0-based device has input connections for S-Video, Composite Video and includes a separate composite pass through connector so you can monitor the input on a TV. Because the Grabster utilises the USB 2.0 port you don't need a separate power supply, so no cumbersome adapter to contend with, as it draws its power directly from the port. Because it's a fairly basic device there's no support for audio. Consequently, you have to use your PC's audio card to capture the audio component of your video productions. This is not really a problem because the audio and video are automatically synced by the encoding software.

The package includes a USB cable and a 3.5 jack to twin phono cable for capturing audio, but surprisingly there's no S-Video or composite cable for video capture. However, it does include two video products from Ulead that are just about worth the selling price on their own. You have Ulead's DVD Movie Factory 3 and VideoStudio 7 SE, which although not the latest versions are nonetheless very competent programs that can be upgraded if you feel the need.

The installation CD has a menu structure that launches both the capture driver and the Ulead programs - this also contains the only documentation for the Grabster and VideoStudio 7 in PDF format. I think Terratec should have included a quick start guide, even a couple of pages would do, because this is intended for the newcomer to DVD video and not everyone would instinctively load the CD.

However, once it's installed it works well, capable of capturing video from 160 x 120 to the full frame size of 720 x 576 at 25 frames per second. The capture quality is quite acceptable considering it uses software encoding, although if you have a modern high performance video card, (particularly one from ATI) you'll probably already have this facility built in. In fact, some newer cards incorporate hardware encoding which is a better option.

The Ulead software provided takes you from the initial capture (including scene recognition), through the editing stage, to the production of quite sophisticated DVD menu structures that include motion menus and predefined themes. As I said earlier these are quality products that represent good value.

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