A few basic questions about format to record to and editing.

[K(c)offee]

My first question is if im recording live TV onto my hardrive what is a good format to record to? When I got the capture card I was planing to record to VCD format and then burn to CD. But my TV and PC are in the same room and the card came with a remote. And my monitor is bigger then the TV so Im starting to think might as well just sit back and watch on my computer. What is a good format to save to my hardrive if all I want to do is leave it on my hard drive? I doubt the VCD format is the way to go. I would like to keep it at most 300MB an hour less if possible. My next question is does anyone know of any good free or cheap video editing programs that could edit the format that you would have suggested in the last answer? All Iwould want to do is remove TV ads and thats it without rencoding. Back to the first question. What is a good middle man format to record live to before I convert to the bettter compressed format? I tend to use my computer while recording so it would be nice if it did not use to much CPU. Anyway thanks in advance.

[Oliver]

I think you're going to have to provide more info to get some anwers to your questions, namely your PC's specs (speed, memory, hard disk space and speed, etc.). To answer to your question about a format that can store an hour of video in 300MB, I don't think there is any way possible without suffering tremendously in quality and image resolution/size. That would equate to what I think a Real Video streaming file, which would look worse than the original TV broadcast.

Also, I don't think with the fastest PC hardware you will be able to use your computer while you're capturing without dropping a few frames. If that is acceptable to you, then you can try it.

You should also state the importance of picture quality in your decision for a capture and compression format. If you don't mind poor quality, then I think you'll be closer to achieving your goals, otherwise you'll have to increase your file size and CPU utilization limits.

Hopefully my post as a newbie myself will spur some responses from the experts on this forum.

[K(c)offee]

Ok. Lets see off the top of my head

AMD Athlon XP 2000+ = 1.67 GHz
640 MB RAM
GeForce2 with 64 MB
PCTV PRO
HD 13 + 15 + 30

The 300 MB file size in a hour was more of a rough guess. I just assumed that VCD format(mpeg 1 or 2 not sure) was not the best for storeing on a harddrive as far as compression went. The quality of VCD is fine so what format would give me about VCD quality but with better file size. Assuming VCD is not compressed as well as others. Also are some formats better for movies and others for animation? And mostly when im using my computer with the capture in the background its more the use of programs like Shareaza(P2P) and other web stuff(IM and Opera)

Thanks for the reply.

[txpharoah]

I use both lower resolution MPEG1 (not quite VCD specs) at 320x240 at 1.0 MB/S captures. Looks fine and files small, well under 300 meg for a 1-hour block. Also use Windows Media Video (WMV) format, as it gives smaller files. The WMV captures just tend to drop some frames on my ATI, so I stick to MPEG as the ATI was made to handle AVI and MPEG1/MPEG2.

[macleod]

I would recommend divx for FINAL video size as you can fix higher quality movies into a smaller size and they are playable on a computer. I haven't done a whole lot with divx, but there are guides and whatnot to capture directly to divx in the guides section. I'll venture to say that you'll lose frames and whatnot with doing other stuff, however, with the divx format, it can be pretty forgiving (i.e. you can capture are nonstandard frame rate, etc.).

I can get a high quality 2 hour movie onto 1 CD, for example. If you decide to pursue divx, I would recommend doing a lot of research on divx to learn how to do it.

if you dont want to learn anything, but want some quick software that will do a realtime capture and give you the ability to remove commercials, I would recommend powervcrII. It is compatible with a number of capture cards, captures real time, and you can ramp it down to small resolutions. From what I have done, I have been able to cap at higher rates and still surf the net, etc.