What source(s) do you use for capturing from?

[hiflyact]

I was just curious as to what everyone is using as their source for capturing? More importantly, people who are capturing entire TV series for their own archives.

Are you using TiVo's, recording on VHS tapes and then encoding at your leisure, capturing directly off cable TV/DirecTV on to your computer, etc.

I'm trying to figure out what will work best for me. Being at my computer everyday at a certain time to hit record isn't always going to work, plus the schedulers can't really be trusted 100%. The best way I think would be to record on VHS and then go from there. I realize the quality would suffer some compared to getting it right off of TV, but it's a cheap method and you can then encode at your leisure or if you happen to drop frames, you can always just play the tape back and try it again.

[qpskfec]

Record on directivo, save to set top dvd recorder.

I edit out commercials by pausing the dvd recorder when needed since I am watching the show at the time. Tivo allows me to skip the commericials easily.

If I want to do more advanced editing, I can transfer the vobs to my PC. Then edit with mpeg2vcr, author/burn.

[andkiich]

Laserdisc/TV/VHS/DV.

[g_shocker182]

Hi-8 from my analog camera. VHS from my really old camera

[almostaborted]

if i'm present i'll just cap using virtualvcr with the cable line going straight into my tv card

otherwise i'll use the vcr for tv series if i'm not present and i need a timer to start itself. i find it's conveninet just like you said hiflyact, the quality of my caps aren't too bad...just get new tapes once you see the recording quality drop

i wonder why virtual vcr never had a scheduler built into the software...

[FOO]

Don't even think about recording to VHS.
Get an ATI AIW and capture directly to MPEG2 on schedule.

a 1 hour show with the VCR takes
1 hour to record
1 hour to capture
at least an hour to encode probably more

[spectroelectro]

For the best possible video quality, record directly from cable or satellite to DV format AVI. Then run the DV file through VirtualDub with a light setting of temporal smoother (typically 2 or 3) to remove video noise from the cable. Then encode to DVD using TMPG.
This takes time, but produces true commercial-quality DVDs at least as good looking as (often better than) the DVDs you can buy in the store.
Recording any kind of video from a TiVO is asking for trouble. It will knock your video quality down substantially. TiVOs encode the video signal into a compressed video format, throwing out roughly 80% of the video information. This becomes visibel when you re-record the output from a TiVO, or, for that matter, the output of a DVD player.
Given a choice, you should _always_ record directly from the cable TV video out or from the satellite video composite or S-video output.
I've done experiments recording to DV AVI from the output of a DVD recorder and the result looks clearly inferior to the output from a cable TV feed.
Bottom line? There's a great deal of video information in a compositie or S-video cable TV signal which gets thrown away during encoding. However, an MPEG-2 encoder like TMPG makes use of that video information to decide which bits to keep so as to produce an optimal MPEG-2 file. If you record the output of a TiVO, you're feeding a greatly compressed video signal into TMPG. As a result, TMPG won't have the extra information available to produce the best quality MPEG-2 file from and consequently MPEG-2 files encoded from DV AVIs recorded from any compressed source look noticeably inferior to MPEG-2 files encoded from a straight analog cable source.

[BillyB]

I capture directly off my satellite tuner through the S-Video connection on my capture card using virtualdub as my capture software. It's an older matrox G400 with onboard MJPEG compression, but it works fine for what I'm doing. Then I edit it and compress it to the format I want using Vdub or TMPGe.

There's a timer available for virtualdub and it's always worked properly for me. As a backup, I'll also tape onto VHS at the same time if it's a one-time broadcast but I also have multiple timezones available on satellite, so I'll capture a show a couple times and use the best version. Since it's so easy to do frame-accurate editing in Vdub, I'll mix and match the video between different feeds to avoid station logos and that sort of thing.

The only real trick to all of this is to setup Virtualdub properly and leave your computer/tuner on without screensavers or automatic e-mail programs running that might interrupt it. I also set the timers for extra time if there's a live event on before the show is supposed to come on. Having a HD with lots of space is also important, so I always optimize the HD before each capture project.

*edit to add some Vdub timer info
https://www.videohelp.com/forum/archive/t164114.html

[Nelson37]

Cable box S-video to ATI, schedule channel on cable box, schedule recording time on ATI, having synchronized the clocks first. Cap direct to Mpeg-2, edit with TmpGenc.

[mrtristan]

I have a coaxial cable plugged into my aiw card and capture tv shows off of that.