PowerVCR

[bigfatretard]

I'm working on the details of building a unit to capture from my satellite, which has s-video and RCA audio jacks out. As this will be my first adventure in capturing, I'm looking to keep it fairly simple. I'd like to use Power VCR to capture MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, but I haven't seen any posts on how well it works. Anyone using it? Does it suck?
This is what I am planning to build-
1500 Athlon XP
128MB PC2100 DDR (do I need more than this?)
ASUS A7A266 Mobo
8GB DMA66 IDE HD (IBM) (is this adequate, or do I need DMA100?)
SB live platinum 5.1 (is this necessary for good sound quality?)

either ATI AIW pro 128 or matrox g450eTV - both entry level cards that seem to have pros and cons. the g450 eTV only captures up to 704x480 - does this matter at all? will i be able to put MPEG-2 captured at this resolution onto a DVD-R? I am leaning towards the g450eTV, b/c I have a good history with matrox.

I guess my main concern is this - let's say I build the above machine, with however much ram and HD speed/space that I need - I am not planning on burning DVD's - down the road, yes but right now I am going to burn VCD's - my questions are

is it fairly easy to capture MPEG-2 with the matrox g450 eTV and burn that onto a DVD-R or convert it and burn a VCD?

Any help would be appreciated.

[Sulik]

Matrox is pretty much dead at this point, they just discontinued support for their graphics/video card drivers.

[bigfatretard]

good point.

anybody have insight into using PowerVCR?

...or if the G800 is on its way? :)

[dattrax]

MMMmmm

If your building a PC to capture from satalite, why not just buy a Tivo? Its a linux box with a large hard disk and sony mpeg2 encoder at upto 14mbps. The quality is unbeatable at the moment from any realtime PC solution.

To get the data off all as you need is a Tivonet network adaptor and you can connect it into you original PC network.

I looked around and have bought various PC capture cards from a WinTVPVR to a DC10+ to a winTV and all of them really didn't work.

Cost of Tivo system £209 for Tivo, £60 for Tivonet = whole system £269
:P

Jim

[bigfatretard]

Very cool. I was unaware that you could connect a TiVo to the PC yet, but the info on the site looks good.

Thanks for your help.

[bigfatretard]

How do you get the video/audio off the Tivo onto the PC?

I don't think this is possible (yet)...besides, if it could be done, you could just build your own tivo, since that would require an understanding of the format of the drives.

[Greg12]

I understand u can just connect it

and i heard some ppl r working on a 10/100 setup for it.

[bigfatretard]

I was unable to find anything anywhere on pulling the contents off the tivo; it seems like it is only for controlling the tivo with your PC if you want to download listings off the net and run the tivo with your PC, or if you want to modify the tivo OS.

Do you have an address for pulling the video off of Tivo with a TivoNet card installed???

[dattrax]

Yes, as thats what I do.

if you go to www.9thtee.com, they sell the Tivonet board, once installed with the software from the site it allows you to telnet, or ftp to the box. The mpeg data is stored on a partition on the box, which you can just cd to and then copy it off. This gives you a .Ty file on your PC, which is an Tivo encapsulated MPEG2 file.

Follow the link http://www.9thtee.com/tivonet.htm and all the software for extraction, and linkup is here.

There are other programs available, I have a windows GUI .Ty extractor, but I don't have the link to it on my work PC.

Jim

[bigfatretard]

Thanks for the links.

Practical questions:

Once you get it up and running, is there any maintenance required?

Is there any limitation to sound and video quality, or is it limited by the satellite broadcast quality/tivo quality?

How long does it take to pull off a 2 hour movie?

Thanks

[dattrax]

It depends what you mean by maintainance

There are software updates which come out every 6 month - 1 year, which erase your settings for the network, so you have to put them back by repatching the box. Other than that there isn't any defragging to do, or anything like that. On the digital cable system I'm on at home, I'm using 'best' mode to record. This is 9mbits second, although you can have up to 14mbits second. At this rate I cannot distinguish between the live, and recorded feed. The network doesn't run at full 10m second, as there isn't any IRQ's provided to the card, so a lot of time is spent polling I think. I did read somewhere in a really old status of the network driver 1m second, but it could be higher than that.

The way I work it is on a night, before going to bed I set the transfer off and just leave it.

Jim

[jeg_jason]

Dattrax,

I am curious to know if you or anybody that you know have gotten any movies off your TIVO that had a full Dolby Digital 5.1 channel AC3 audio track attached. This would be the final excuse that I need to get rid of my analog cable for good. I also assume that I would need a TIVO unit that is integrated in the digital satellite receiver for this to work as well.

[Dpick]

You can modify a TIVO and install a brodband modem that replaces the phone modem that a TIVO 1 series uses to update its schedule. With brodband, you can stream all TIVO recordings to the computer thru the eithernet jack. But you'll need to install a certain program thats free to convert the TIVO recordings into a compliant MPEG format if you plan to burn the movies to disk. The Screen Savers on Tech TV have been showing how to do this. Go to www.techtv.com/thescreensavers to check how much this would cost and how to do this.
But to save alot of time and effort, buy a Sonicblue Replay TV recorder that already has an eithernet jack and records in MPEG 2 format that would save alot of recoding and modifying your recordings that you would have to do from a TIVO . Both a TIVO and Replay TV cost a monthly fee and you would end up voiding the warenty if you did this on a TIVO.