HD capture out to dvd recorder?

[thinger62]

I've got another thread going regarding my problem. I have an HDTV card that apparently has a strange audio format that I'm having no luck transcoding and putting on dvd. The cap files do play (and look/sound) beautifully on my pc though. In the meantime, is it possible to connect the video out on my video card (I think it is an ATI x300 pci-e) to my dvd recorder and make the necessary audio connections and then record? Would I be recording just the capture, or would I be recording my entire desktop with media player playing the file also?

[FulciLives]

That would work but you would be recording the entire desktop yet all you ned to do is just put the media player you will be using into Full Screen mode and bye bye desktop. In fact some video card's TV out function will lock on to just the video and output that minus the desktop anyways so ... really it's not a problem.

Audio should be fine but you will only be getting regular 2 channel stereo audio ... say bye bye to 5.1 AC-3 which will get downsampled to 2 channel stereo.

So yes this method you suggest will work but it is not the most eloquent solution yet it will work and the quality should be decent to very good depending on the quality of your video card's TV out function.

Having said that there are threads on converting HDTV captures to regular MPEG-2 DVD spec files.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[thinger62]

Thanks for the quick response. It is a public television special on Monty Python, with old footage, so the quality is not so hot to begin with. Our ota pbs station does not come in very well on the analog station, or I would have just recorded it to the dvd recorder directly. It does come in crystal clear on my HDTV and in my HD capture card. I don't want to sit in front of the computer and watch this though, and unfortunately, my HD tuner card seems to have some strange audio stream that so far is un-burnable (that is the other thread I referenced in the first post).

[edDV]

The x300 has the ability to downscale a HDTV stream to the screen resolution of your "2nd monitor" which is probably the S-Video output if you are feeding a DVD recorder.

The "screen resolution" assigned to the S-Video output in display properties determines the "full screen" desktop size that will be window sampled to the D/A and S-Video out.

Assuming a 1080i playback*, 800x600 (full screen mode) is a setting that produces a letterboxed representation of the full 16:9 image. Comparing this to the letterboxed S-Video output from my Comcast HD cable box (excellent quality), the ATI scaled output shows deinterlacing artifacts and a softened look. Levels appear ok.

If you use a 1280x1024 (full screen mode) with a 1080i playback, the S-video output shows a 4:3 center cropped representation (i.e. sides chopped off). This magnifies the deinterlacing errors but shows more vertical resolution.

If you use the HDTV adapter to YPrPr, you can get a better looking 480i (or 480p, 720p, 1080i) output but DVD recorders won't take a YPbPr input.

Overall, the cable box produces a superior quality S-Video "recording" output compared to ATI cards in S-Video out mode.


* for this test I was playing a 1080i MPeg2_TS stream with VLC.