Best soultion for digital cable TV -> Mac?

[Wender]

Hi,

Does anyone have a good recommendation on this one? I have digital cable TV with a Nokia digital tuner (no recording facilities and no digital outputs). Right now I have a Pioneer DVR-630 standalone DVD recorder connected to the Nokia with a good S-video cable, but that means my recordings go digital -> analogue -> digital, right?

What I want to do is to get the actual stream from digital TV (which is m2v and ac3 I believe, in some kind of transport stream) and get those exact files to my Mac for making a DVD of it in DVDSP.

DVDSP handles m2v/ac3 and even better my m2v/PCM streams from my Pioneer-recorded DVDs (after demuxing). When I had analogue cable, this was the best way to go - no transcoding after recording the DVD on the standalone.

Should I get a different digital TV tuner with a hard drive? A DreamBox? Some kind of card? What's the best way to get that digital stream to my Mac, unaltered and uncompressed? Or is the tuner->standalone with an S-video cable regarded as an optimal solution anyway?

Thanks for any input.

[rotuts]

Hello

go to this forum and join: http://www.defyne.org/forums/

I have a divcoHD card in my g4dual and love it. FyKnight and his pals write the drivers for these and other cards. ask here. I think most of this forum is for over the air HDTv but the group is knowlegable.

Id look into a card if you have a 'fast' enough Mac. the HD stream is not conpresses so you get by with a dual G4 but a G5 would be better.

DIVCO has a card that diffenerent from mine that takes cable DV.

good luck and please report back to let us know what you learn and what you do.

rotuts

[cicero]

If your digital cable is Clear QAM, then I'd recommend the Elgato's EyeTV 500 firewire tuner. You get the raw mpeg stream as transmitted. It's a bit pricey and the EyeTV software has some quirks but I've been pretty happy with it. Note that it is an 'HD tuner', but it works fine with SD digital cable and maybe you will move up to HD later. Or perhaps you get some HD cable channels now as part of your package but don't otherwise have a tuner?

[Wender]

Hi! Thanks for your replies. I will check it out.

Cicero: I live in Norway. I can only find the Elgato EyeTV 610 in my Apple store, which is not HD... However, it does what I want - I think... These Elgato boxes relies on a Mac being connected to it at all times, right? I think I would prefer some kind of box which is a digital tuner and recorder in one, with the capability of recording the unaltered stream(s) and exporting to my Mac whenever I want. I guess the Dreambox is an option, using MPEG Streamclip to import over Ethernet. Looks like I have some reading to do and some decisions to make