Easily Record TV Series in MPEG4 ?

[quantass]

I'm very interested in recording a television show off my SDTV cable service. I would like to record the show and have it encoded to MPEG4 format so that I can burn and keep the entire series of the show on DVD as .AVI format. I've heard of PVRs used to record several hours of television but havent heard much about the tools to extract the recorded video onto a PC.

Can you recommend the most affordable but effective hardware i should look into to record several hours of a television show and have it encoded into MPEG4 format? I was considering videocards that do MPEG4 hardware encoding (if necessary -- I have a P4 1.7GHZ PC) but if there is a cheap standalone unit like an affordable PVR that can consume hours of the show then easily stream it out to my PC then I'd consider that.

Thanks.

[harley2ride]

One fairly inexpensive solution that would be worth considering, is the new ADS DVD Xpress DX2. It appears to be able to do that as well as divx and xvid. Do a google search and see if anyone has reviewed/tested one yet. I read about it on the ADS web site, but it is their product, and before buying one, I would look for a little more info on reviews, or folks that have actually used one. I have a couple of ADS products, and I'm very please with their performance. (ADS Firewire PCI Card, and ADS PYRO AV/LINK). Both have been very good products. I believe that there are a couple of PCI cards on the market which will also handle MPEG4. Try a google search with PCI+MGEP4.