ADS Tech DVD Express 2.0 (USBAV-701)

CANT USE IT I HAVE A ADAPTWER AND WILL NOT UP DATE OR CONNECT KEEP SAYING CANT FIND THE UNIT LOOK FOR PROPER CONNECTIONS. VERY DISAPPOINTED. BY THE WAY THIS IS NOT MY FIRST EXPRESS UNIT I HAD TWO FOR ARCHIVING VHS MOVIES TILL THEY WERE STOLEN BY A HOME INVASION

I received the package, hooked it up, and loaded the CapWiz. It worked fine, receiving signals from the Sony VCR/DVD and creating a file. Next, I loaded Ulead Movie Factory, and attempted to create a DVD. 20 minutes into the process, the error message "This file has serious errors" displayed. I clicked OK, and another error message appeared. Movie Factory has something wrong with it.Next I opened up Sonic Solutions MyDVD, and imported the DVD Xpress file. I used the editing and DVD creation functions, and they worked fine .So now I use 2 programs that can transfer a VHS tape or DVD to a DVD.These software companies actually don't want people to copy VHS tapes to DVD. The Sonic Solutions program supposedly will capture from a VCR, but doesn't have a driver for it.Before getting DVD Xpress, I bought Pinnacle Software Dazzle 150, which said on the box that it will capture from a VCR. The driver for the Dazzle 150b box could not enable the computer to recognize the box, only a DV camcorder. I downloaded the Dazzle Driver from their website. It worked 2 times, but it would stop working after a few minutes. Then I tried to reload the driver, and it wouldn't work at all. I conclude the software is only good for use with a DV camcorder. If I were in charge of the Federal Trade Commission, I would order Pinnacle Software to shut down today for false advertising. My rating for Dazzle 150 is Zero stars.I bought the Dazzle 150 because the Sonic Solutions MyDVD did not have any capability to capture video from a VCR, again just a DV Camcorder. I rate MyDVD at 2 stars, since it would create a DVD.The computer I use is a Dell Dimension 5100, which meets the system requirements for the 3 packages. No other programs were running when using the Video Capture programs.So the net result is I can copy VHS tapes after paying $250 for software that shouldn't have been needed if Sonic Solutions MyDVD had worked correctly.I may get the money back by using these software packages in ways the makers don't want me to.

After reading the reviews I decided to give it a try, in the hope that I wouldn't see many problems others reported. I ran it to capture a couple hours of video (VCD quality) and found similar problems.1. CapWiz crashes once. It's definitely a bug in the software.2. When the scenes change and there's empty signal in between, the capwiz will freeze. I have to resume recording manually.3. Sometimes it will capture nothing (black) while the video is running. Need to restart several times to make it work.Finanlly I managed to overcome all the unpleasure problems and got the job done. The longest footage I captured is about 50 mins and I don't see audio out of sync as other reviewers said. I have Athlon 1.2G, 256M ram and geforce ti 4200.

The good: Its hardware based encoding design means that the conversion from analog video to mpeg2 is done inside a chip on the device, not by your computer's cpu. It also menas that while digitizing video it doesn't hog your PC's cpu nor does the resulting file need any post processing.The bad: the bundled Ulead editor is a big pain in the back end. If you just want to do quick edits and cut scenes out pretend that the included Ulead software is missing and install VideoReDo instead. ([...])Install was flawless for me on WinXP home. The bundled video capture application on my CD was Capwiz version 3.1 dated February 2004. If you check the Adstech.com web site you can find Capwiz 3.5, which adds "on the fly" capture and burning to optical media, but I suggest everyone buying this device to stay with Capwiz 3.1.ADSTech technical support warned me in no uncertain terms back in Nov 5, 2004 that there were still "stability issues". "Note that many customers have reported stability problems with this version so if you have any problems with it we strongly recommend getting rid of it and going back to version 3.1".Version 3.1 of Capwiz, still offered on the site and I guess for a reason, seems to have everything a user might need, without "feature bloat" or "instability" warnings. Speaking of which, a new beta version of Capwiz 3.6 has been released in mid-December, adding yet more features to the mix like "direct capture into DivX" (mpeg4), but that sends cpu requirements through the roof and defeats the whole idea of a hardware based mpeg encoder because it's you cpu which has to then convert the mpeg2 video sent by the device to mpeg4, thus requiring a 2.4 Ghz. P4.In short: I've found the bundled VideoStudio 7 editing software to be a poor choice. The bundled Capwiz 3.1 is ok and you should use that to save digitized video to your hard drive. Then I suggest you check our VideoRedo for editing.I give this unit 4 stars. It delivers what it promises... decent quality hardware MPEG2 encoding for common people (people doing professional video work will surely need a higher-bitrate capture board). And it comes at a price that anyone can afford.

I read the reviews of this product from users who were not satisfied with this hardware, but I found that the setup is relatively straight forward, with the exception of the usb problem I had, and it makes it easy to make dvd's from home videos without having to go through another time consuming process of converting the video to another format. I use Nero to create the movie from the ADS file without any problem. When I first tried to set up the ADS usb using a hub, it wouldn't identify my usb. You have to plug the usb directly into a usb connection in the computer or it won't work. I found this to be a great product to use in making my dvd home videos. - Michael Riley