Getting Started: I'm so confused

[planetp]

I've been perusing this site (and tutorials) for about a week, and at the moment I've made little progress in figuring out my best solution. There are just too many options, formats, and encodings, regional restrictions to easily navigate this area to achive what I want.

Here is all I want to do:

1) Record a TV program.
2) Burn it to a DVD (efficiently - meaning at least 2 hours of video), so I can put in my player and watch it.

Thats it.

So why is this so hard?

I'm so confused. I have a Sony DU500. And I have so many questions.

First, what card will do this? I"m looking for something that is reasonably priced and will work on my PC, using a PCI slot.

Second, I would like to be able to capture and record this TV program to a popular video format such as MPEG, or Quicktime, so that I can also watch it on my computer if I want.

Third, I would like to then burn this recorded program to a DVD to watch on my DVD player. But, do I burn it to a DVD-R or +R? And how do I burn it so that it will fit 2 hours (like other DVD's), instead of the 45 limit that I seem to be encountering when buring mpeg's to it?

[Skylooker]

First, do you have to burn to DVD-R or would (S)VCD be suitable? VCD uses regular CD-R discs which are much more economical and if done correctly, can produce pretty decent results. I use VCD all the time to archive History Channel documentaries and stuff like that and I think they look as good or better than VHS and take up far less space on the shelf. For my money, DVD would be overkill for stuff like that. Plus, you can still watch a VCD .dat file through Windows media player. The only catch is capacity. Although you could probably get close to 2 hours worth of information on a VCD, quality would be sacrificed.

If your heart is set on DVD then you should know this...

There are many many video capture systems out there. I use the Dazzle DVC-II, which I'm not crazy about but it works so I'm not going to upgrade just yet. What will work best for you will depend largely on your need. Everyone seems to have a different opinion on each product. Just look around and read the forums and maybe click on the "Capture Cards" section on the left sidebar.

The amount of video (time) your DVD disc will hold depends primarily on the bitrate at which the video was encoded. Although I will say, that 2 hours is not a lot to ask of a standard DVD-5 blank disc. I'm not a wizard on bitrates, but you'll probably find that you can use a pretty high bitrate and still fit 2 hours of video on one blank DVD.

I hope this sheds a little light on the subject.

[mkelley]

There's a lot to all of this -- but the good news is that after you get started it will get easier and easier very quickly.

To begin with -- just what is your video source you want to capture? You say capture from television, but do you mean an external television source (like a sat. dish or even a VCR) or do you mean you want the television tuner/capture to be in your computer?

Most people get a capture card that has RCA and/or SVideo inputs, or, alternatively, use firewire capture for DV. I've got both -- I use firewire for my DV (with a PCI firewire card) but use the Dazzle Hollywood bridge (which connects to that card) which converts any analog source from the RCA/SVideo. I actually love the Hollywood -- never drop any frames no matter how bad the source -- but there are lots of alternatives. You need to do your reading about the capture card pros and cons as the previous poster suggests, and then you can ask questions about the specific card you're interested in.

You want to watch the program on your computer -- is it something you only want to watch once, or do you want to watch it repeatedly? Because if you're burning it to DVD you might as well just watch the DVD on your computer using the PowerDVD software that came with your Sony drive. If it's only something you want to watch once, you don't need anything other than media player, because once you capture it using your card you can play back the captured format, whatever it is.

To burn it to a DVD you need to have it encoded into MPEG -- you can either capture directly to MPEG (if you don't intend to edit) or you can capture to DV-AVI, edit with any of the popular packages (Premiere, Vegas Video -- Premiere came free with my firewire card) and then encode it to MPEG video. Then you need to author it to DVD -- your Sony should have come with an authoring package, although there are much better ones out there (I think the 500 comes with DVDIt -- I have the Sony but I've never used that software, much preferring DVDLab).

Encoding at 5mbps variable rate will enable you to fit almost two hours of video onto your disk -- but you need to become familiar with encoding to understand these things. However, even at a very high bitrate you ought to be able to get almost 90 minutes on one disk (I do it all the time). The encoding package will help you in this regard.

All of this requires a learning curve, but in a few short weeks you'll think of it as being pretty easy (I've been burning LOTS of TV onto my Sony 500, as well as lots of everything else).

[bugster]

I won't comment on your capture options as I know little about this, and Skylloker is probaly right about taking a good look at the users capture card comments section. Just to add to what he said:-

The amount of video (time) your DVD disc will hold depends primarily on the bitrate at which the video was encoded. .

The size of the final mpeg-2 file that you will author to DVD is dependant entirley on 2 factors, bitrate and playing time (length) use a bitrate calculator to see what encoder bitrate you need for a particular length of movie.

+R/ -R, really depends on the compatibility of your DVD player. Again, look in the DVD players list to see if anyone has tried on or both formats on this model.

The general process is this:
1) Capture
2) Encode to DVD compliant mpeg
3) Author as DVD-Vide0
4) Burn

Setp 2 can possibly be missed if you get a capture card that will encode on the fly to DVD compliant mpeg-2, quality will usually be compromised compared to a seperate encoder though.

Step 3 and 4 can often be combined with many DVD authoring programs.

Hope this helps

[planetp]

Thanks everyone for all the very helpful information. I figured I was simply suffering from the overload of the learning curve. And Hi MKelly, I live in Carson City too, small world!