Product Reviews

Plenty of video capture devices will help you turn your old VHS home movies into DVDs, but what if you don't fancy swapping a dusty set of tapes for a pile of discs? In addition to the usual formats, ADS Tech's DVDXpress DX2 can transform them into compressed files that you can post on the web, or play on a number of handheld devices.

Sturdily built from brushed aluminium, this USB2 device offers a choice of S-Video or composite inputs for connecting an analogue video source, such as a camcorder or VCR. The bundled CapWiz utility tackles the process of grabbing video by asking a few questions to determine which video standard to use, then asking

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which input you're using and what video format you wish to save the final results in.

The ADS Tech's biggest selling point is that in addition to the usual MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 formats used for Video CDs and DVD movies, it can capture directly to two highly compressed MPEG-4 formats: the proprietary one used by Sony's PSP and Apple iPods, and DivX. The latter is popular on the internet, due to the fact that it offers high-quality video from files a fraction of the size of MPEG-2. Only very new domestic DVD players support DivX. Helpfully, the ADS Tech's software provides a factsheet on video compression, with a quick guide telling you how much space each of these formats takes up. Extra tools are available in the program's manual mode to tweak your video's brightness and colour balance.

The last choice to be made is whether you want to capture the video to your PC's hard disk, or write it directly to a blank CD or DVD. The latter went smoothly on our Athlon XP 2500+ test system.

If you fancy editing your video before burning it, a copy of Ulead's VideoStudio 9SE comes bundled with the ADS Tech. This allows you to drag-and-drop clips into sequence as well as applying a few basic transitions and caption styles.