Cable signal problems

[timbo-wilderbeest]

I’ve been recording many a favorite film over the years from TV and transferring them to DVD, but much as I’ve enjoyed the process I’d really like to bypass the quality issues of transferring from VHS tape to DVD by recording the signal straight on to my computer. I do have a TV tuner card on board and have tried recording movies before by this method, but it just so happens that all our cable outlets, bar the one hooked directly to the cable box, have had poor signal quality on many of the channels and have thus been a waste of time from the recording point of view. After putting up with it for a number of years I finally called Brighthouse and asked them to come out and fix it, which they did by and large by installing a new splitter in our attic and a booster by the cable box. Only concern is that my favorite movie channel, TCM, still has something of a problem in that the signal still isn’t 100% and has some faint diagonal banding on it. The cable guy said that the signal is as good as it’s going to get, pointing out that the reason it’s perfect on the TV hooked up to the cable box is that the electronics on board clean up the signal. To get the same quality on my computer I’d apparently need to rent another box from Brighthouse, which I think is pretty pathetic.

I can either move my office out to the living area, buy and set up another computer with a TV card next to the main TV so I can record a perfectly clear signal, or be done with computer processing and simply set up a DVD recorder on the main set. Someone along the way did tell me that I can set up an external hard drive (I happen to have a 200GB external drive handy) to the main TV so I can record and transfer movies over to my computer, but as I was pursuing another line of questioning at the time I didn’t follow up on it to find out what he meant or how it could be done. I figured later that he must have meant there was some way to connect the drive to a VCR or DVD recorder.

Can anyone give me some pointers on all of this? Was the Brighthouse guy talking through his hat, or do I really need to get another box hooked up to my computer if I want a clean signal? And does anyone know what was meant by the point that I could hook up an external HD to the main set/cable box?

Other than that, I may have to start looking around for a good DVD recorder with a hard drive, decent edit functions for ad removal, and flexible chapter setting.

Thanks in advance……Tim

[redwudz]

Unless your cable box has a compatible output format for a computer type hard drive, which is not too likely, that may not be of much help. I would look into a DVR with a hard drive myself.