Capture card for satelight?

[|Supreme|]

I recently got dish network services and I was wondering if anyone knew of a good tv card capable of receiving the service on your computer as well as capturing it somehow. If anyone knows of any please let me know.

[reboot]

If you want dishnet on your computer, you need another reciever, plugged into a capture card.

[TBoneit]

I'm afraid reboot is right. Here in the USA there are no capture cards that will work with Dishnetwork or DirecTV. Such a capture card would have to be provided by Dish complete with Smartcard and Smartcard slot for future upgrades. Plus it wouldn't be cheap. The captures would not be DVD ready due to resolution used and GOP size amongst other reasons. And it wouldn't be capture card like you are thinking of, but rather a complete receiver that stores the stream directly off the satellite as it is a MPEG2 stream. I'm not expecting them to ever offer such a card as the channel suppliers would nix it as the only reason to have it would be to out the content on a DVD/Divx or whatever.

One way get a 501/508/510 or Dishplayer 7100/7200 where the video can be extracted from the hard drive, software in the Yahoo group, Dishrip.

Or do what I do, Pioneer 531H DVD recorder with its own hard drive, makes editing easy. Or any cheapo DVD recorder if you don't expect to want to edit or plan to edit and reauthor in the computer.

Quality won't be bad if you stay at the SP (2hr. speed in the recorder.

The extraction method will give the best quality but only works on the models I mention, not the 721,522, 625 ,9XX HD series and may never be possible on these drives due to the DMCA and the content being encrypted on the drive.

TTFN

[Nelson37]

The other option would be to use a receiver with firewire out and a DVHS emulation package. This apparently works for cable units, have seen no definite confirmation that it does work for satellite units.

If you get one, please report back with model numbers and results. Most especially if you get it to work, but even if you don't. That way, I will know not to waste my money on the same unit you got suckered into!!!

[TBoneit]

I don't think many dish makes many receivers with firewire out. If any they'd be the HD models, Pretty sure one 921 it was disabled.

[jetfan]

I have Directv and here's what I do, I use the s-video output of the receiver, connect that plus the audio to my camcorder(Sony), use its pass through, then connect a firwire to my computer and transfer it that way. You will get a DV file of approx 13 gig per hour. You can then take that file to any editing program and go to town, or if you do not want to edit, just hook the receiver to a DVD recorder and use it as a vcr. I have been using this method for a while now(firewire), you have to do it in real time, but I find that it's super easy and I am very happy with the results.

Ps. My computer is in another room, so I use 2 -15 foot firewire cables, coupled together, the second one has a repeater built in.

[TBoneit]

BTW jetfan, a good DVD recorder can do a good job of edits.

I use the Pioneer 531H that has a 80Gb drive. With this machine I can adjust brightness, amount of color, correct the colors if need be, sharpen, noise reduction, adjust white level, adjust black level. I can choose GOP accurate edits for fastest burns when done or frame accurate burns where it burns a 1X instead of up to 16X with Gop edits. Put chapters where I want. I can title the video with two 19 character lines. I can split a capture into more than one title, or I can combine title into 1 title. as long as they were not split before. I find that the edits go pretty easy anf fast. Using the remote I can use all the playback features to get where I want when editing. IE FF, FRev, Slo-Mo & frame by frame.

But for me despite having a ADVC 100 to capture video, the biggie is speed. 2 hours to capture a show, 5 minutes to edit and name, 8 minutes to burn with finalizing. Quality is good. I am using it a lot on basic cable when they have fundraisers on PBS, and the PBS Mystery series.

Cheers