After performing the physical installation of your video capture card, the next step is to install its drivers. After turning your PC on Windows will detect an unknown multimedia device. Run the video capture card’s installation program to install the drivers. You can check if the drivers were installed correctly by going to Control Panel, System, Device Manager and checking them under “Sound, video and game controllers”, see Figure 24. In our example, our Leadtek TV2000XP Expert video capture card was correctly installed.

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Figure 24: Video capture drivers.

If Windows isn’t recognizing your video capture card, try physically reinstalling the card (it may be a bad contact) and, if that doesn’t work, upgrading the video capture drivers by downloading the latest version on the manufacturer’s website.

If you are using a video card with VIVO function, you need to install the VIVO driver, if it isn’t already installed.  If your video card is based on an nVidia GPU, open nVidia’s download page, select Multimedia Software, WDM driver and then your GPU model. Download and install this driver.

If your video card is based on an ATI GPU, it will probably be using ATI Rage Theater chip. The driver for this chip is already included in Catalyst package (Catalyst is the name given by ATI to their video driver). You may want to upgrade the video drivers to their last versions going to ATI’s download page. Pay attention because you need to install Microsoft .Net software before installing the video drivers (this software is available on ATI’s website).

Now that everything is connected and the drivers are installed, it is time for capturing what is in your VHS tape. This is done by software and we will cover this on the next part of our tutorial.