Best (cheap) capture card compatible with Win7?

[Terenigma]

Looking to buy a capture card to play some games with the sole intention of just using it to replace my TV. I will be trying to run it on my laptop (specs in spoiler below) and I want to try and find a cheap one as HD picture perfect quality is not at all importent to me. Just want something that is playable.

Can anyone recommend me a decent one? I saw the easycap ones going pretty cheap on amazon but several reviews say it doesnt work with windows 7 (which is what i have) so if you do recommend that then please do clarify what you did to make it work.

Thanks in advance!

Spoiler

Brand Hewlett Packard
Item Weight 2.6 Kg
Product Dimensions 37.4 x 24.6 x 3.3 cm
Item model number CQ56-111SA
Screen Size 39.6 inches
Processor Brand Intel
Processor Type Pentium T4500 dual-core 2.3GHz
RAM Size 3 GB
Hard Drive Size 320 GB
Operating System Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

 

[qaz00]

If you are playing games thru it as a TV replacement, the one thing you care about above all else is input lag - basically how long between the video signal going into the capture device and it being shown on the screen. My experience with several capture cards is that most USB ones have terrible input lag unless you buy a decent one, and that PCI capture cards seem to have very little lag, regardless of cost. Since you are going to use it with a laptop, you have to use USB.

My personal recommendation would be a Hauppauge (http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/site/products/prods.html) device, like the WinTV-USB LIVE2 (£40) or if you can afford it one of their higher end capture cards.

I own an original WinTV-USB which is very usable for live video playback, but sadly the last OS with drivers for it is 32bit XP.

 

[OmniShadow]

if you'r not looking for quality, just to play on the comp screen, then go with an easycap and use virtualdub for the video/audio part. easycap is just about as cheap as it gets. and virtualdub is a free program. with your specs, if you have no intention of recording that that would be your best bet. like you said, some reviews say its not too compatible with win 7 but thats fixed with drivers. if you dont want to chance with the drivers, then get a dazzle dvc100. I use it with virtualdub and have decent playback, on win 7 64 home premium. 6gb ram, amd athlon IIx4 processor

 

[jargus]

For that purpose only an SD capture card is available to you. The old EasyCaps do not have Official drivers that are Win7 compatible, but I've used third party ones that have worked. If you want to record like that I can't guarantee it'll work out but for playing you definitely do so with the included software's preview or another's. Virtualsub is a great choice for capture preview. Like qaz said look into latency/input of the particular model you are looking at and that will determine your decision. I always used my Easycap with honestech's capture software and always got good timing with both video sound.

 

[qaz00]

Virtual VCR (http://virtualvcr.sourceforge.net/) is the preview/record tool I use with my capture setup (a BT848 based PCI card with btwincap drivers on an XP64 desktop), though I have also used VirtualDub / VirtualDubMod (http://www.virtualdub.org/) in the past.