The A/V Raider Do you need to do some light video capturing, or have a pile of analog videotapes that you want to send directly to DVD? Do you abhor your computer’s existing sound capabilities? Creative’s USB Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Video Editor might be your answer for both needs. It’s not only a video capture and output device, but it also appeals to audiophiles with its DVD-Audio, Dolby Digital and DTS decoding capabilities. First Impressions Creative’s USB Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Video Editor is a slick silver and black box with the potential to look like a pincushion with its sheer number of ports. Not only does it act as a USB hub with ports on its front and rear panels, it’s also got composite and S-Video inputs and outputs, digital audio inputs and outputs, a headphone jack, a mic jack, front-panel volume and mic level controls, three 1/8″ and one set of RCA stereo line outputs, an RCA stereo line input and a FireWire port (for DV-family camcorders only–you can’t attach any other FireWire devices to it). Beef up your computers sound, Order yours today! Features/Specifications: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS PCI Sound Card; General Features. Should the Audigy 2 sound card be supplied with the 15-pin Game Port/MIDI expansion connector, as per the specifications on the Creative web site? 'Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Getting Started. Style game controllers with my Audigy 2 ZS sound card that came in my. Dimension 4700. Besides, the sound card series were changed significantly as well. 5.1 is to be replaced by 5.1-channel Audigy LS with 24/96 format support, while Audigy and Audigy2 — by Audigy2 ZS. Besides, the sound card series were changed significantly as well. Besides, a useful comparative summary table is published at www.soundblaster.com. However Creative chose Audigy2 ZS and also introduced confusing Audigy LS. (Whew!) In your hands, the Audigy ( sorry, Creative–if we mentioned the product’s full name over and over again, we’d run out of words! –Ed.) is surprisingly heavy for its size. One reason for that heft is because that little box also contains an honest THX-certified audio amplifier. Due in large part to that audio amp, you will need to plug it into a power outlet on your power strip or UPS to make the Audigy work. We attached the Audigy to a USB 2.0 port on a modest Celeron 1.8GHz machine with 256MB of RAM, Intel Extreme Graphics and an 80GB hard drive. Installation and configuration of hadoop tutorial. Since it replaces your computer’s existing sound hardware, we plugged our Philips powered speakers into one of the Audigy’s 1/8″ stereo audio outputs. We found Creative’s installer to be a little bit touchy, in that there were some major lags between steps. We took out the CD-ROM at one point thinking the software was finished installing, which apparently made the installer unhappy. (More on this later.) The installer also dropped an AOL icon on our desktop without us asking for it, which didn’t make us particularly happy. It didn’t appear that any AOL software actually landed on our hard drive (it’s possible it was just a small “Insert the supplied AOL CD and sign on today’ announcement), but that icon had a date with our computer’s recycle bin as soon as it landed on the screen. Sounds Good The first thing that we noticed was how much better our computer sounded once the computer rebooted. However, we did notice some audio stuttering at first, which caused us to realize that the on-board audio chip wasn’t disabled. We disabled the onboard sound and noticed that the sound was even better as soon as the machine came up for the second reboot. Sound Blaster Audigy 2Sadly, though, our test machine did not have a DVD-ROM drive, so we could not test out the additional DVD playback sound enhancement features provided by the Audigy. Video In We were itching to put some video through the Audigy, so we fired up our copy of Windows Movie Maker. Windows Movie Maker then dutifully reported that it couldn’t find a video capture device. Puzzled, we reached into the box and pulled out the SE versions of Ulead’s VideoStudio 8 and DVD MovieFactory 3 provided in the box. We couldn’t capture from them, either. As it turns out, the aforementioned fussiness of the driver installation program caused the video capture driver to not be installed, so we had to reinstall the software, with a little more patience this time. Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Zs SpecsSound Blaster Audigy 2 ZsUpon the next reboot, the drivers got loaded onto our system and we were able to capture from both VideoStudio 8 SE and Movie Maker. Capture was as simple as it gets–the driver includes a selection between S-Video, composite and DV inputs, and video can be captured as DV, MPEG-2 or MPEG-1. Incoming DV can either be transcoded to MPEG-1 or -2 or brought in as a full DV data stream if you’re using a USB 2.0 port. Sound Blaster Audigy 2 SpecsYour best results will come when you use a USB 2. Challenger 4 post lift installation manual. 0 port–using USB 1.1 will limit your combined audio+video bitrate to 5Mbps. Free quick heal antivirus for pc window xp 2012. Analog video is processed with a LSI Logic DoMiNoFX video processor, which includes some motion compensation optimizations and other little tweaks to improve the quality of captured video. We found the video quality to be quite good, breathing some life into some old Hi8 footage we brought in via a classic Hi8 camcorder, the Canon ES4000. If you want to capture in MPEG, bear in mind that its data structure makes it difficult to edit, and you will most likely experience your system bogging down substantially when editing footage that you capture as MPEG. This was our experience with our poor Celeron, as observed with our hard drive’s activity LED being steadily lit for several seconds at a time. Therefore, we would recommend MPEG capturing most strongly for those who want to take their footage directly to DVD without editing. Toasty Goodness Living with the device for a while, you’ll notice how toasty-warm the top surface becomes.
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