Capturing 5.1 / AC3 audio on a secondary sound card

[elister]

NOTE: Reposting this in the correct forum.

Ok this is my setup.

ATI All in Wonder 8500DV - Samsung T351 HDTV Tuner - AMD 1.8Ghz

Basically I would move the HD Tuner back and forth from my HDTV to my computer. I capture local late night shows, so 6 days a week its connected to my PC, the 7th day its re-connected to my HDTV for football.

Eventually I got a 50 foot S-Video cable and a 50 foot rca audio cable. The HD Tuner can output both S-Video and DVI at the same time. It can also output the digital audio on Analog, COAX & Optical. I ran a test of last weeks playoff games and the video quality was great when encoded XViD 700x2. Thinking I could squeeze in the AC3 since its 1.4 gigs in size.

I heard MyHD is a good HD card to buy, but I dont have enough for that. I was thinking of buying a cheapo 5.1 sound card that has a COAX digital input, which would let me record off the HD Tuners COAX digital output.

Currently looking at this card. Its cheap and has what I think it should have.

http://tinyurl.com/d7698

Also, while I believe my ATI AiW will be able to record off the COAX signal, Im not sure it will be able to keep the AC3 audio intact (instead downgrading it to 2 channel analog).

Will I need to use a different piece of software to capture in order to do this?

[mikiem]

I've not done anything with HDTV, so pretty much a guess...

*If* you're captureing analog rather then stream, which I assume from s-vid, audio timing will be off unless you go through aiw input, which lets you passthrough (maybe), or record stereo. Takes less then 1/2 hour to fix in Vegas, but you need stereo track to match with.

Don't know many easy or cheap ways to record 5.1. It's possible you could capture the ac3 stream and later decode that, but I've got a card with the same chipset as you've pointed out, & it won't capture stream as is. Soundblaster 5.1 cards will record decoded ac3 5.1, but I've run into prob. when the files gets too large so recording stops after about 20 min I think. AFAIK the right way to do it is with multiple cards & software that'll record multiple tracks at once.

[Nelson37]

There are a couple of audio cards which can capture an AC3 digital stream, which can then be processed for DVD-ready.

The M-Audio 2496 card apparently can do this. Connect digital audio, record as wav, run thru BeSplice, and voila! AC3 sound.

Matching this to recorded video thru another device, and recording both at once, may be an adventure.