I'd be hesitant to recommend an ATI card at this time.
Their hardware probably is some of the best, but the software support is miserable. I had an ATi All-in-Wonder Radeon 9700Pro which had SVHS out and an adapter that looks like
this.
It's full featured with inputs/outputs, but ever since drivers about a year or two ago, the performance was terrible using ATi's multimedia applications. This is largely due to the lack of new All-In-Wonder cards from ATi, making it "dead" product line although they deny it being dead.
If you were willing to use older drivers, it would perform better and I actually used it to convert a VHS tape to DVD at one point which was relatively painless using VirtualDub (a freeware app that can capture from video sources and can edit/cut/crop/chop/append videos in a variety of formats). However, depending on your system specs,
you may just want a tuner that does all it's encoding in hardware (e.g. it won't eat up your CPU time or create choppy video due to maxing out your CPU)
Although I've never used one, Hauppauge has relatively well rated TV tuner cards that support hardware MPEG2 encoding. However, those models don't have S-Video out. You'd just need a video card with an s-video out which almost all video cards have had since the Geforce3 era, but I'd recommend a Geforce4 or greater because prior to that generation, you could only send video to the s-video out or the vga monitor, not both at the same time.
I'm not sure where the cut off is for ATi cars, but I can vouch for my 9700 that it could do both TV out and VGA at the same time.
In all fun and liking a little debate here I'll join in a bit.
Current ATI hardware the TV Wonder 650's & new 750's are supported WONDERFULLY by Windows Media Center, and a host of other products free or paid. It's true that the included Previously for 5 years Catalyst Media Center was/is Terrible - the included Arcsoft's TotalMedia 3.5 with some of the 750 products, is a bit better though it lacks an EPG other than for OTA digital.
If you have Windows 7 or Vista with a Media Center (download TV media pack 2008) and the ATI cards are great they compete at much lower price points and rank equal or better in quality than competitors.
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While the old ATI treated us All-In-Wonder users horribly, I still prefer using there products [the enemy you know sometimes is easier to slay kind of Bull crap] - but I do grab other brands when they are on sale or to fit a particular need like when only PCI ports are available. Anyway, there are tons of bugs with Hauppauge, if you sit in there camp they have all got issues, or AvMedia, or KWorld etc.....
I'm not sure exactly which software you are talking about from 1 year or 2 ago that has affected your 9700pro... ATI capped the AIW's Legacy line at Catalyst 9.3 barring bug fixes in 2009; however long before that the requirements of modern games made updating Catalyst on those old cards un-necessary.
The RADICAL changes that ATI did happened in 2006 right before AMD bought them out; when they switched from the very good Analog drivers to $#1++y digital T200 unified drivers. Failing to explain what was going on the incompatibilities of running analog drivers with digital MMC or vice versa. When AMD shut down the line the bugs remained frozen in time with MMC 9.16... a truly aweful piece of software compared to the MMC 9.06.1
ATI has had several hardware encoding lines (TV Wonder Elite, 550, 650's).
However, I will say that nothing does a better job with NTSC Analog cable than than my A-I-W 9600, 9800, X800's (AGP). Hardware encoding is overrated with today's fast dual, tri, quad or even six physical processing cores. Even back in the day with my lowly Pentium 4 2.8Ghz 512KB 400Mhz (SL7EY) processor in a Dell Dimension I had no performance issues recording with a software encoder.
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ATI for an unknown/surprising reason has decided in the design of the TV Wonder 750 (USB & PCI-E lines) to go back to software encoding which again not a big performance issue but also not a selling point in 2010? A bit perplexing to say the least.
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They (AMD) did in fact cancel fire / let go etc. the All-In-Wonder department in 2006 so it was dead until they ran a bit of old tired blood through the corpse slightly reviving it by putting a chip on an already lower end mainstream card (unlike in the old A-I-W lines when the cards competed well with the fastest graphics cards of there day. IE AIW -9600XT = same speed as 9600XT, A-I-W 9800 Pro = Same as 9800 Pro though there was a faster XT out, it could be modded or clocked to match it. AIW x800XT = X800XT. But the "All In Wonder Hd3650 was FAR FAR from that" No reviving of MMC and packaging it with CMC is not really what I call a true All-In-Wonder. More like a a lot-of people-disappointed (AL-OP-D). I read some while back that they had sold off (in an effort back in the ATI 2900 days to stop the financial hemorraging) their TV Tuner / chip division. Not sure the status on that... Seems that the hay day of TV Tuners making a lot of money is over the next big thing will be the yet to arrive (unlocked Cable Card systems for PC's).
It's too bad that given all the GREEN lights now that from the Television, Movie, Cable, and Microsoft that ATI doesn't come out with a much smaller / redesign (unlocked - like other company's are supposed to be & have been releasing with 3-4 tuners in them from one card) cable card system.
The first ones were supposed to hit the market late 2009 - they didn't. The next deadline by a prominent company has been pushed TWICE now in 2010. HD Homerun thought to be a distance competitor has increased the tuners offered from 2 to 3 and may well end up beating the others to market.
Some thing that unlike the OCUR works with systems that pass a certain performance standard but otherwise aren't locked to certain motherboards / manufactureres - allow 2 way Pay per view and on demand etc. WOW those will be popular. As prices (in the 300-500 range expected at first) drop, especially when you factor in the long term savings from a Cable Card over a bulky set top box units could (using fuzzy math) pay for themselves after three years.
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Anyway, there is VERY little benefit in trying to run a legacy All-In-Wonder (9600, 9700, 9800 X800XT) with anything newer than Catalyst 6.2 video drivers and MMC 9.06 (9.06.1 or 9.08). Lots of negative changes to the MMC program after 9.09 and I can't think of a single benefit to using it and a huge list of negatives.
