Longest Continuous Capture?

[quicksilverg4]

So, how long? What was it and what was your setup?

[TJohns]

15 hrs (~52 GB after filling the recording drive!)
Digital TV recording (by accident)

[grossjamesh]

Well the longest I have captured is 12 hours at standard DVD quality.
That filled up about 30 - 40 gig.
Hauppauge WinTV PVR-USB2, WinTV2000 and a 250 gig HD.

[Almost Human]

18.5 hours using 45GB during a TCM old horror movie marathon. ATI AIW7500 to a WD 160GB HD.

[Abbadon]

Recorded 24 hours from a surveillance camera in an old Divx format, just for fun using Virtualdub and a cheap TV card, cannot remember the size of the file(s), resolution was 640 X 480, home assembled computer, audio was encoded using mp3 compression.

[JohnnyMalaria]

If timelapse is allowed then more than a week from a camera setup in a downstairs bathroom to catch a building contractor entering on to my property after telling him that he must no longer come on to the property and that if he did then I would sue him for trespassing. Well, he did - along with a friend - to take photos, trample flower beds and urinate against the wall. A court case is pending...

Camcorder was a Sony DCR-S100 hooked up to a T30 laptop running our software in timelapse mode.

[hech54]

11 Hours via Hauppauge PVR-350.

[GMaq]

If timelapse is allowed then more than a week from a camera setup in a downstairs bathroom to catch a building contractor entering on to my property after telling him that he must no longer come on to the property and that if he did then I would sue him for trespassing. Well, he did - along with a friend - to take photos, trample flower beds and urinate against the wall. A court case is pending...

Camcorder was a Sony DCR-S100 hooked up to a T30 laptop running our software in timelapse mode.

Whoa! That's Bent!

[stratcat50]

Recorded 2007 Daytona 500 (3.5 hrs) just as a system test.

Source: DirecTV cheapo receiver.
Capcard: Some kind of BT848 with WDM custom driver from Sourceforge.
Has TV, Comp. & S-Video ins. S-Video used.
Soundcard: SB Live! Value with kx drivers, custom (minimal) DSP setup.

Video: 29.97 fps, 640x480 size, 640x480 preview, HuffYUV compression.
Audio: Stereo PCM 48KHz, uncompressed.
Software: VirtualDub version was current at the time.
OS: WinXP SP2, all unneeded services, etc. set to manual & stopped.
I use 2 hardware profiles ("Normal": everything on and "A-V": as described above)
XP asks which one I want to use at boot, defaults to "Normal".
Capture drive: WD SATA 250 GB, formatted 64K block size (for huge files)
CPU usage: 20 to 22% throughout.

Audio & video quality was excellent, A/V sync OK (DirecTV has issues in that dept.)
Max A/V sync error less then 300 mS. The error was not steadily increasing throughout
the recording but was changing from nearly 0 to the max and back at random places.
(You can watch DirecTV and see/hear their sync slipping in and out at times.)
Sync fixed by chopping the AVI at commercials and manually sliding
audio tracks in Vegas 8, then reassembling with fades (and without commercials ;^).
End result: Excellent. It showed that the system worked. Reformatted the disk
and went on to the next project.

[mrswla]

Audio & video quality was excellent, A/V sync OK (DirecTV has issues in that dept.)
Max A/V sync error less then 300 mS. The error was not steadily increasing throughout
the recording but was changing from nearly 0 to the max and back at random places.
(You can watch DirecTV and see/hear their sync slipping in and out at times.)
Sync fixed by chopping the AVI at commercials and manually sliding
audio tracks in Vegas 8, then reassembling with fades (and without commercials ;^).
End result: Excellent. It showed that the system worked. Reformatted the disk
and went on to the next project.

It could be your Directv receiver. I record from the HR20-700 and have never had an a/v sync problem in the two years that I have been recording from it. I use to have a couple of problems, years back, with the directv tivo boxes. That would require me to reset the unit everytime the a/v sync showed up. But like I said, that was years ago and the newer boxes I haven't had any sync problems with.

Now, on another note, I have noticed a little pixelation. But I think that's from Directv compressing the video too much.