Question: Capturing Through Firewire/S-Video from digi cable

[hrdspencer]

I have a Scientific Atlanta cable box on Time Warner Digital Cable...On the back, it has a 1394 firewire port. Why is it there? is it possible to export the video and audio from the cable box into my computer through a firewire cable? I'd test it out, but i dont feel like investing 30 dollars for no reason if it doesnt work as i have no other use for firewire. Any response would be greatly appreciated... If not, looks like i'll be capturing through s-video on my all in wonder. Can anyone give me a ballpark answer about how good my video will look by capturing through a all in wonder 7500 on a 2.26 pentium 4, 512 pc2100 ddr ram system? If i burn it to dvd, will it look anything like the quality of what i was seeing on tv when i watched it originally? will the quality be significantly degraded? does anyone have a sample of dvd quality mpeg that they could send me just so i know what i'm dealing with w/ analog capture? Any help appreciated, thanks much!

John - Hrdspencer@aol.com - AIM- Hrdspencer

[tmcmvd]

Don;t know about your cable box ? Is it digital TV ? Often these connections are used for other purposed used by the cable company to program the box etc. Just like the Playstation 2...

On the other hand it might be a digital out, if the cable signal is digital..you will have best quality without investing too mutch.

Using an AIW 7500 you can get a nice quality, you will always have soem loss and will have to mess around with software and drivers to get the card to do what you want.

Basically you would want to capture video in max res without compression using HUFFYUV or MJPEG (little loss) codec. Afterward convert to MPEG with TMPGenc for higher quality MPEG-2 than ATI will give you.

Depending on you TV you will get the same quality as from capturing from a high-8 of other S-Video source.

Just try to capture some tv program using the AIW7500 with standard software in max quality and see if it works for you...

When using better software the quality will slightly inprove.