PC capture card vs. DVD recorder

[6079]

I've used DVD recorders for some time now. As I understand it, the HQ setting fits about 1 hour of content onto a DVD. And this is MPEG 2 encoding, to my belief.

The question is whether using a PC card to capture the information from your television would be the same size/quality if you were to use the highest quality setting. Aside from getting into HDTV/PC cards, would the PC card have a higher quality than a DVD recorder?

Thanks.

[davideck]

My Toshiba DVD Recorder captures with the same quality as my Hauppauge PVR-250 MPEG_2 Encoder card. Much of the time, the Toshiba is just more convenient.

Capturing via 1394 and encoding in software may provide improvement, but it is also more time consuming.

[edDV]

A typical DVD recorder will have more up to date and sophisticated analog to digital processing chips than a typical PC capture card.

DVD recorders encode to MPeg2 in hardware as do some PC cards like the Hauppage PVR. If you use such a card, the performance is similar to the DVD Recorder.

Other PC cards rely on software encoders or capture uncompressed or to DV format. Workflow steps differ. In some cases better quality is possible depending on the process, software used and time spent.