Recording a TV Series

[jarros]

Hello! I'm going to be recording a ton of Seinfeld episodes (I hope to have all of them recorded eventually) from my computer. I have a Radeon AIW 7500, which has a TV tuner and TV output. I'm looking for a few pointers. What I plan to do is record one episode at a time, remove the commercials, compress the video file, and archive the video on CD. The AIW card has a TV out, so I won't need the files to be in VCD format, just anything that will play on the computer. I'm going for the closest to TV quality (final video size, approximately 100 MB for each 20-some minute episode, I'll put 7 episodes on a CD). So this is basically what I am asking:

1)Capturing video suggestions:
I can use ATI TV to record the clips, any format/quality settings suggested?

2)Removing commercials:
I've started using VirtualDub, but can't quite find the right format/quality settings for output. Any help here or suggestions for other programs to use.

3)Compression:
I'm testing out Dr. DivX right now, any suggestions for settings or any other programs that I could use.

If any of these questions have been answered in other posts (I've tried to look for them before posting this topic), a link to that thread would be great. If not, I'd appreciate it if you'd leave any suggestions that you may have. Thanks in advance.

Jared

[jarros]

Oh yeah, I'd like to add that I'd prefer a fairly simple method for going about all this, as I will be following the procedure 180 times. Thanks.

Jared

[G-man]

I did the same thing onto DVDs; got 9 or 10 on a Disc at 1/2 D1. Took a long time, glad I have a Tivo to collect the episodes.

I used DV Camera passthru to capture and then TMPGenc to remove commercials and encode, and finally DVDMF2 to author and burn.

Good luck!

[jarros]

Can TMPGEnc convert to DivX? I'll probably burn all the video files onto DVD, but just as data files (I won't be playing them on a DVD player anyway). I've heard that DivX has the best quality to file size ratio, so I think I'll stick with that format (unless someone says otherwise). If TMPGEnc can't convert to DivX, is there another file format where I can have good quality video (good enough to play on a tv) and keep the files to 125 MB for a 25 min. show? I think that VirtualDub can convert to DivX. Anyone have some suggestions for quality settings to keep a 25 min clip to 125MB? Thanks in advance.

Jared

[hudsonf]

The site is down for a update but when it's back up try lordsmurf.com . He has a excellent guide for capturing with the ATI cards. I followed his guide for MMC 8.x and capture to mpeg2 with great results.