How can I record without TV card?

[Xavier]

I have digital cable-tv, and want to use my computer to both watch and record shows. I am mostly interested in recording, but it has to be in an open format so I can transcode it myself. I have heard that the PVR card doesn't support TV cards, and has to be used with the providers own PVR. Because of this I assume I have to "stream" it if I want to record it? If so, how can I do this the best. I don't want to spend several hundred dollars on this, but if it costs that much I still want to get a solution. It is no big problem for me to for example record with my PVR and play/stream it to my PC, or play/stream it live. So what I want to know is how it is possible. Are there any HDMI cards for PC? How much quality will I lose with a composite card? I have only a few HD channels, the rest is "normal" (SD?) digital signals. I have also heard it costs a lot? I have a TV and PVR with a recorder, but I would love to be able to keep my recorded programs on my PC instead.

[DereX888]

What youre asking for is known as "dumping the streams" to hard drive.
Digital cable tv in general is no different than your DVD - similar MPEG audio and video streams are being sent to your digital cable decoder. So similarly as you do when "ripping" DVD to your hard disk, you could do the same with the digital tv's streams.
Unfortunately it is impossible with digital cable tv, as all of them are protected/scrambled and no one have ever cracked their protection (I don't even say "yet" because no doubt any sane person would have not try it anyways, modern top-of-the-line computers are still many generations away from being fast enough to break such protections). Thats why you need the "set-top decoder box" from your digital cable tv provider, or a PVR from your provider (which is the same decoder + hard disk).

You can though "dump" some protected digital satellite tv streams and unprotected high-definition of-the-air broadcast streams to create perfect archival material for yourself (no capturing or reencoding), providing you're willing to educate yourself in the subject (and I'd say "forget it" if youre a newbie, specially when it comes to digital satellite streams dumping which involves not-so-legal methods).


/edit/
You say you have PVR decoder box.
If you open it up, you'll find a hard disk inside.
Modify the decoder box for yourself and install hdd connector, so you could plug the hard disk without opening PVR's case.
That way you can move PVR's hard disk to your computer back and forth without any trouble.

[Abbadon]

There are PCI DVB-C cards in the market that are able to tune unencrypted cable tv channels. If the channels are encrypted, you would need a method for decryption (CI Module + smartcard for example), or by
using a Phoenix interface ( ISO Smartcard reader).

But, as you probably can tell, I am not in Norway, so keep in mind this only in theory.

Does your PVR comes with Video-Audio out connections?, some video cards are equipped with Video-Audio-In and this is a function you could use.

[Xavier]

It has loop out, composite, hdmi and scart

[Abbadon]

If you don't mind spending a few euros in a cheap TV Tuner with the 878 conexant chip, you would have the chance to just use the composite for recording (make sure the TV Tuner comes with composite Video In socket).

There will be some loss of picture quality, but recording could be possible.