Recording from 2 Cards at Same Time??

[reubenray]

If you have 2 separate hard drives, is it possible to record from 2 separate cards at the same time? I have the MyHD to record OTA-HD and the DAC100 to record from my satellite receiver.

[redwudz]

It would depend on how much processor time each input stream uses. I have my doubts it would work, but you can try it. If you are just doing a simple data transfer as in a firewire DV datastream, possibly.

[non-linear]

I doubt it. Perhaps if you had a dual processor system you could pull it off by having one processor used for each capture device, but video capturing takes a lot of system recources and I really don't think it would work since there would be too much going on in the system (processing, data transfering, hard drive accessing).

You could try it anyway and see what happens. Just don't be doing something you really need and can't do over again later for testing purposes (like recording a show from satellite that you can't get again).

[pixel]

I doubt it also.

First of all the processor probably couldn't cope with doing two tasks like that. (if one is a satellite decoder card and you are capturing in AVI or DV from the other card, it is possible).

Secondly, to ensure elimination of dropped frames and aud/sync issues, you would need a seperate OS drive, then you would have to have 2 other drives solely for capturing set as master, by themeselves each on a seperate IDE channel to have the data move as quick as possible.

[TurboRunner]

Maybe if you have 2 computers capturing you would only need one monitor, mouse and keyboard sharing between the 2 computers and maybe network the two computer for tranfer of the captured video footage.

[Alan69]

Mpeg would likely mean forget it, since the processor is working hard for mpeg.

With only raw simple but large AVIs I would bet it could be done easily enough. Processors are plenty fast to take bytes coming from two cards and stick them to two drives, assuming seperate IO channels etc..

BUT, since you'd need the extra seperate HD and capture card to do it anyway, SPEND say $100 or $120 and get the best MB/CPU you can for cheap and build a seperate system. This has the tremendous advantage of being able to still use the main computer while this capture system is capping. With a single system set to cap to two drives, even if you only are recording one show you couldn't do anything else without risking dropped frames, Windows is very slow to relinquish control back to the other task at times if you're actually doing something else too. A dedicated box and capping with your main system the few times you need to get two shows at once is much better all around.

Alan