best of the best for capturing TV on my PC

[leeannhoskin]

Allrighty, I'm just wondering if someone can help me out! I think Im in the correct forum here-
Here's what I would like to do SOME how:
I would like to hook up a vcr some how to my system (even if i need a certain card for that) and be able to record my tv show's on my system and put them on DVD/CD for easy viewing at a later time.
Im not too computer smart here, so I may be using the wrong term, so bare with me! IS there a TV tuner card or "capture" card that can do this?? If you could refer me to something, that would be great!

I Have:
bought a DVD recorder: worked great, but not the way I was hoping for it to!
bought the HP DVD movie writer; lets just say this, i burned a test CD today, and Im still waiting on my dvd player to play it! it's just sitting there "trying" to read it.

any help would be great! I have a top of the line PC...
if you need any info from me, let me know!

[trossin]

I am very happy with my Hauppauge PVR-250 capture card.

http://www.hauppauge.com

I got it for $100 in the fall 0f 2002. It captures from S-Video, composite video or from an antenna. It has a hardware MPEG2 compression chip that will spew DVD compliant files to your computer disk. It came with a copy of Ulead Movie Factory that allows me to take the captured movies and author them to a DVD that I can play on my standalone Panasonic RV-31 DVD player.

If you set up the PVR-250 correctly (they have a DVD template), you can author and burn the recorded file and have a disk in your hand in less than an hour. Since the output from the card is MPEG2 you don't have to reencode the data to MPEG2 and you don't have to mess around with terabyte files (just kidding but the cards that capture into avi format produce files up to 10x larger than the final output).

If you want a simple capture, author, record process this is about the simplest way to go. By authoring I mean editing out the start and end of a movie or getting rid of commercials and optionally creating menus to access the clips or chapters.

[sikki_nixx]

Hauppauge cards are quite good but if you want excellent quality you shouldn't use any hardware MPEG2 compression... I have a Hauppauge PCI-PVR card and the hardware mpeg2 chip is terrible...
Buy a cheaper card (any capture card without a MPEG2 chip), save some money and spend them on good software instead.

You'll get better results capturing to .AVI with a nice little program called, Virtualdub, (using Picvideo MJPEG or huffyuv compression) then encode the file to MPEG2, author & burn. This demands a bit more of your processor and you need a large HD but as you have "a top of the line PC" it won't be any problems...

You say you're not "too computer smart", but I'll suggest you'd do alot of reading on this issue, there are great sites with guides for capturing video with a capture card... Also this forum is a goldmine for video captures.

You'll find lot's of info here:
http://www.digitalfaq.com/

There are other good sites but I can't think of any right now...

[FulciLives]

One of the better if not the best capture cards (or device in this case) is the external Canopus ADVC-100 which can be had for around $250 to $300 US Dollars.

Yes it is a bit expensive but it works very well and is mostly error free.

Please note that after you caputre your video that it will need to be converted to MPEG-2 DVD format. This can be done with TMPGEnc or CINEMA CRAFT ENCODER or Mainconcept MPEG encoder ... all three of which are popular choices.

Please note that this conversion from your captured file to your MPEG-2 file is usually slower than real time but it does get you the best quality.

This method works very well for VHS conversions or in short any video source that is less than perfect.

However if you have a stand alone DVD recorder and use no more than the 2 hour mode you should get acceptable quality assuming you have good receiption like cable or satelite.

If you like to record a lot from TV then you may not be able to "keep up" with the computer method due to the slower than realtime encoding to MPEG-2 DVD format.

So basically it boils down to speed vs quality.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[FulciLives]

I should have pointed out that many people use ScenalyzerLive to capture from the Canopus ADVC-100

This program makes it possible to do unattended TV recordings.

However ... the Canopus ADVC-100 only has a composite and S-Video input. It does not have a TV tuner input. So you either need to use a cable box or satelite receiver box that features analog outputs (just about all do) or use a VCR as a tuner (then hook it up with the analog outs).

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[roberts83]

I have Leadtek TV2000XP Deluxe.
I capture using supplied PVR software. No problems so far.. no dropped frames, out of sync issues, etc, etc.

I have Athlon XP 2400+, 512MB RAM, WinXP Pro, 80GB hard drive (32mb/s sustained write).

Only problem i usually get afterwards is different framerate for each of avi segment... 25.005, 25.013, 25.020....

Robert

[tatty]

This is a question I can understand, having just gone through the same learning process.

I'm no expert but, for what it's worth, don't waste money chasing the perfect capture card - it doesn't exist. Closest is probably the ADVC100 but it's still only part of the solution, and you can spend £250 more wisely.

You need a decent PC - the faster the better - better than 2GHz with 512KB RAM and a BIG hard drive ( I keep running out of space on my 120Gb) but as for capture cards, buy the cheapest you can find that has the BT8x8 chipset. Cheapo 'TV' cards are OK - ignore the bundled software. Slower PCs will work, but you'll spend a long time waiting. You can upgrade (rebuild) your PC for less than the cost of an ADVC100.

I set up a small (8GB) second bootable disk that holds the applications specifically for Video - nothing else. XP is set up for minimalist operation - no screen savers no nothing. Booting from this disk means I don't carry any baggage from other applications, which means more reliable capturing.

Plug your VCR into the capture card. You need VirtualDub to capture the raw video (avi). This produces HUGE files - at Full PAL size, about 40GB an hour but hard disks are cheap.

Turn the avi into DVD-compatible mpg with TMCGenc. Takes a long time but you soon learn to run these jobs overnight.

Paste together the various mpg clips with TMC TDA authoring tool. This also includes a burner to save the final product to DVD. If your video's too big, then use DVD Shrink to squash it down a bit. Oversimplified a bit, maybe, but that's basically it.

All these tools are available for free trial through this site.

[FulciLives]

@tatty

I too use a PCI capture card and I capture using the PICVideo MJPEG codec. I am VERY happy with the way my captures and MPEG-2 encoding turns out (I mostly use CCE these days but also TMPGEnc).

However ... you must admit ... that this method is perhaps not for everyone because in short a lot of tweaking is needed to get it "just" right.

That's why these days I recommend the Canopus ADVC-100 since it is fairly "fool proof" and as you say perhaps not "perfect" but about as close as we have to it in the capture world of the home hobbyist.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[lchiu7]

My primary capturing is done on a Athlon 2400+, 1G DDR memory, 60G(C drive) and 250G (D drive) for captures, Hauppauge WinTV PCI card and Iuvcr. I Capture using PIC at quality 19 so I get about 10G/hour. With this arrangement I find I can work away doing other stuff on the computer, and hardly drop a frame. I reauthor to DVD using Virtualdub (to remove commercials and deinterlace) framserving to Mainconcept.

Works fine most of the time though every now and then for reasons that I havent' worked out, I get a video with sound and picture going out of sync. Plus though my input is cable, TV picture quality is often note the best. My cable company sends many channels via the cable unscrambled (rebroadcast free to air channels) so the Hauppauge can tune into them directly. For scrambled channels, I have to use a different PC, feeding the av output from the cable box to Duron 1.3Gz with a Pinnacle DC10+ card. This captures really well to (in native mjpeg) and I author the output the same way.

Maybe one day I will get a HD recorder - just can't justify one yet