[Mikkel_48]

Hi!
Note: I am not a gamer or an expert in Video cards! Also sorry for this long post!

This question arose because I wanted to capture video from a VCR via my video card to an AVI file.

Hardware details:
Gigabyte GA-7N400-L motherboard (K7 Triton)
AMD Athlon 2500 CPU, 512Mb RAM, at least 3Gb free HD space on system drive.
Software:
Windows 2000 SP4, DirectX9 installed

I have a second-hand GeForce 256 card also known as a ASUS V6800 deluxe with 32Mb RAM. It has both
video in and out sockets. I updated the BIOS to the latest version earlier this year.
The driver CD has various utililities - one is "ASUS Live" for viewing and capturing video from an external source. I coud not run the install program from the CD (presumably corrupted) so downloaded the latest version of the Live utility (V4.6b2) from the ASUS site, and installed. It also installs a Capture driver which is listed in Add/Remove programs.

Although the "Live" program window doesn't remotely look like the one shown in the manual, I eventually got the settings right (Video format & source) and could see the incoming video in the preview window. I then tried to select capture mode but it gave me the error "Connecting to capture driver occurs error..." (sic)
"Please check your capture driver is correctly installed or not, then restart your Windows...".

I tried restarting Windows, but then I could no longer see the video in the preview window. Also tried uninstalling/re-installing ASUS Live, and running the manual Capture Driver install util in the relevant Program Files folder, but nothing helped.

I thought that maybe there is a standard format for video capture chips so I installed a Capture Utility I found on Source Forge (sorry forgot to bring its name to work). While instaling this my system suddenly reset. After reboot my video driver was disabled with a Yellow exclamation mark saying there weren't enough system resources for it to load.
Re-boots made no difference - still came up on the defauilt VGA driver.
There was also another unknown device listed with same problem. I deleted it and the video driver went back to normal status. On re-boot, windows wouldn't load and mentioned a missing system file (sorry don't have its name here at work). I stopped at that point.
I should be able to fix the boot problem.

So my questions are:
1. So does anyone know of any way to fix the ASUS capture driver installed as part of ASUS Live so it works properly?

2. Is my theory (above), that there should be other capture utilities available that will work with my card correct? If so, can anyone recommend a good one? Do I need any other application in addition (i.e. to preview and save the incoming video to an AVI)?

3. I should mention that the video source is a VCR tape which is degrading and which I want to keep. So my ultimate goal is to transfer to an AVI file and then convert to a DVD format ISO and write to a DVD disc. Can anyone recommend a good convertor (preferably freeware)?

Any help appreciated!