That is the king hardware

[seps]

Hi all,

I'm about to enter the world of capturing and recording tv programmes. I would really like to get a few pointers on what hardware is the best for the job.

I need to be able to capture from DV-Cam and I need to be able to record from two tv-channels at the same time.

I have cable-tv - it's not digital, but it might be in short time, so the capture/tvcard could very well be ready for that as well.

I don't care about timeshift and live-tv, but I take it, that all better cards have that.

I don't know if it's possible to record straight to DivX, but if there is hardware out there, that does a good job on that it would save a lot of time and space.

Let me know what card I should buy or which things I should look for in a card.

ThanX

Seps

[Nelson37]

Two channels at once from the same card is not possible, SFAIK without adding a second card.

Digital transfer is a completely different operation involving a firewire port and not a capture card.

Divx (MPG4) hardware encode very rare at this point.

[FulciLives]

1.) As stated above only one capture at a time per capture device.
2.) You can do multiple captures at once with a single computer using multiple capture devices.
3.) DV camcorder is easy. This connects to the computer using the DV port which is known as IEEE 1394 or i.link. All DV camcorders have that type of output. Most computers do have that type of input ... if not then it can be easily added to the computer.
4.) For computer capture I would get two Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250 devices. You could also buy two stand alone DVD recorders but I would make sure you buy models with a HDD built-in if you will be doing a lot of recording.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
Forgot about using MPEG-4 (i.e., Divx and Xvid) as a capture format.

Also ... with two of the Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250 capture cards you can do two captures at once but the DV camcorder to computer capture is really just a very high rate data transfer but it should be done with nothing else gonig on or it very well will screw up ... too much data moving during this to "tie up" the computer doing other things at the same time.

I think you are better off with two stand alone DVD recorders or one stand alone DVD recorder and one hauppauge WinTV PVR 250 ... in this way the computer is never doing two different captures at once. Again two captures at once is possible but not the best solution.