DirecTV capture to DVD-R, best capture card?

[emigrant]

I'm new to this, bear with me please. I have a Dual PIII 800 with lots o' drive space, optionally have an Athlon 1600 available. I own a WinTV-D, a Osprey-100, a Winnov PCI and an old Miro DC20. I have a handful of SBLive! cards if needed.

I want to capture Formula One races this season from my dish service, save them on hard disk, and burn them onto my Sony DRU-500a. I have money to get a ~$300 USD capture card, not sure what to get. One I've looked most closely at is the Hauppauge pvr-350.

Should I be capturing directly into MPEG2 for this? I'll also want to edit out commercials, etc. Any help is greatly appreciated. Wish I had last season's races, which is why I want to be prepared for this year esp. since we're getting the Bernie-vision feed in the USA now.

thx

[jfebus]

Hi,

I think that the WinTV-D will let you capture tv into mpeg2 files.

Regards,

[bpjenn]

I have an ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon with a 800MHZ computer and can capture DVD compliant MPEG-2 at 352X480, 6000kbps without any frame drops. You can purchase a new ATI AIW 7500 for about $135.

[BKL]

I do alot of caps from DirecTV and recommend using a digital camcorder with analog pass-through to convert the TV signal to DV and then bring it into your computer via Firewire. I use a Dazzle Hollywood DV-Bridge to perform the analogTV-to-DV conversion to save my camcorder. ADS Tech and Canopus also make analog2DV units. I haven't tried the ADS or Canopus units and must say that the Dazzle unit occasionally disappears from my system.

[emigrant]

Turns out I purchased a Canopus ADVC-100, I use that to capture via firewire into Premiere 6.5. Too bad VirtualDub doesn't seem to do 1394.

I cap it all as .avi, then I edit out commercials and export to MPEG and burn to DVD. The ADVC-100 does a fantastic job of straight MPEG capture, can't crow about it enough, but I like to be able to edit so .avi is my best path to happiness.

[gf]

CANOPUS ALL THE WAYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!! :P :P :P :P :P :P :P :P