What is the cheapest way to capture decent quality videos?

[ViperXT]

I want to be able to capture from my satellite reciever which putputs in Mpeg 2 according to the logo on the reciever. What is a good inexpensive TV capture card? I don't mind long encoding times or whatever as long as the quality is decent. I mostly want to copy television shows onto a SVCD. Are there any devices that allow tv input without a dedicated card? Perhaps a USB device? Also are the cheap cards I see at http://www.compgeeks.com good enough to do what I want?

Here is my system: PIII 600
128MB PC-100 RAM
32 MB TNT2 Ultra /w TV-Out
Soundblaster Live
Acer 4x4x32 CDRW
52x CD-ROM

Also are the cheap DVD drives($35) I see at the above mentioned site any good? I want to get into DVD ripping also. I already know how to make good vcds, just the other day I extracted the movies from Diablo II and burnt it has an XVCD with 720 x 480 and a bit rate of 2500. Thanks for any help you can offer.

[ViperXT]

come one someone please answer me! Don't tell me no one on this forum can help me. Thanks in advance.

[hitechjunkie]

ok, first, forget about that mpeg-2 logo on the receiver. the output from the receiver is gonna be analog, not digital, but fairly decent looking analog output.

now, as long as you have a lot of disk space available, i'd have to say that any TV tuner type card will do the trick for capturing raw avi from your satellite receiver. if you're real picky about video quality, look for a TV tuner card with s-video input.

if you're short on disk space, then you'll need a card or external device which has got compression builtin.

well heck, what am i ramblin on so much about? take a look at the Capture Cards link to the left, under OTHER

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: hitechjunkie on 2001-08-16 10:17:10 ]</font>

[neto]

How did you ripped the videos from DiabloII?
I know the original CD comes with a file .mpq or something like that, please tell me!

Thank you in advance )