Grabbing transport streams or recording to DVD recorder?

[Wender]

This one could go in several forums but anyway:

Have been thinking about getting a digital cable TV tuner with a hard drive, so I can record the unaltered streams on it and imoprt them to my Mac (there are several solutions, like the Dreambox). No compression or altering of the streams is important. And MPEG-2 stream goes to my Mac or PC and into my DVD authoring app. Turns into a nice DVD when authored with menus etc...

Now I use cable TV -> digital TV tuner box -> s-video cable -> Pioneer DVDR standalone DVD recorder so basically the signal goes digital -> analogue -> digital. I don't like that analogue step.

Now for the tricky part: I COULD buy a box that records the stream, or a TV card for my Mac that imports the same stream and work on it from there, but what happens when everything goes MPEG-4, which is NOT a DVD standard and I would have to alter the stream anyway.

I know I would have to do a test to find out, but right now my digital -> analogue -> digital source is excellent as I can see it. The DVD-R discs burned from my standalone gets demuxed into MPEG-2 and PCM audio on my Mac and then I make my DVDs from those streams. Looks nice, but a direct stream capture would be more "pure" agreed? Question is how long would it last. Next year? Then there's no MPEG-2 streams anymore but slightly more compressed MPEG-4.....

Am I rambling? Any thoughts?

[SatStorm]

Most DVB streams need re-encoding to became DVD, because they use non compatible 9with DVD) framesizes.

The benefit you have when you grab direct the stream, is that you do not capture, you transfer the transmission "as is" to your PC. So, you don't have any kind of analogue noise on the video and the audio part to filter from the proccess of capture

beyond that, I don't see a real benefit in your case over what you now doing...

[Wender]

That's a great answer. Also I have learned there's a difference between interlaced on DVB and progressive on DVD standards so anyway there must be some alteration going on to make a DVD-R from a stream, even though the bitrate is OK.

The advantage of grabbing the transport stream would be if it is ca 4mbps, you could fit two hours on one DVD and still call it "full quality" because it doesn't make it better to increase the bitrate, at least that's how I understand things...