video capture card advice

[MikeClark]

Hello, I am studying which tv video capture card to buy. I use Windows 7 and have Charter cable HD. I have been using Camtasia Studio 7 for animated screen capture and video editing, along with a Logitech Webcam Pro 9000 and a Blue Snowball cardioid microphone. Sometimes I use an older version of Sound Forge for audio, sometimes the webcam software, sometimes Camtasia.

My objective is to produce web videos, and I would like to grab tv video to incorporate into them. I have looked at cheaper single-stream cards, but apparently you have to watch the video to record it. It would be very cool to grab multiple shows on schedule like a dvr, then edit them at my convenience.

InfiniTV 4 USB by Ceton costs $299 and requires a multi-stream CableCARD™ or M-Card (apparently $2 per month from Charter?). They *claim* that you can record 4 streams at once.

Does anybody have any experience with this? I have seen various problems mentioned with Hauppage.

Cheers
Mike

[Tom Saurus]

I will leave it posters with more knowledge to advice you on what capture card might suit your needs. I was just thinking with all the copyright laws that exist and are coming down the pike grabbing video from television and mingling it in with your own video footage and putting the resulting video up on the web might result in a costly mess for you down the road. Maybe you should give this some more thought, and think of the possible ramifications of mixing some copyrighted video with your original personal footage.

[usually_quiet]

By all accounts Ceton makes great products, and they can record 4 channels at once. I have seen many glowing reports about their customer support as well.

However, a digital cable tuner will not work for what you want to do. You can only use them with Windows 7's Media Center and Play Ready installed. They will not function otherwise. Play Ready is needed to encrypt all programming designated "copy once" by your provider. Once encrypted, a recording can be watched using the computer that recorded it, or using an XBox 360 as a media extender connected to a TV, but not using any other computer. It cannot edited, converted, or copied to a different container either. Unfortunately, "copy once" will be applied to almost every channel other than your local over-the-air stations, and some premium services. Local channels are "copy freely" by law and won't be encrypted. Premium services are usually designated "copy never" and cannot be recorded at all. There is no way around Play Ready encryption at present and no way to fool Media Center into recording copy-protected programming without encrypting it.

[MikeClark]

Thanks for the feedback. Regarding copyright and the current up-in-arms attitude by media companies, I believe my use is covered by "fair use" of short segments for news and commentary. Newspapers and tv news shows quote each other all the time. I would certainly argue fair use, although if a battalion of lawyers were coming at me.........point taken.

Regarding capture and editing, Camtasia will capture video with audio. I just ran a test case with a netflix movie. There may be some technical limitations, but for short segments I am fairly confident that it will work.

Glad to hear Ceton is reputable. Their pre-sales support came through quickly with answers:

"You can schedule and record 4 shows at once and play them back, just like a cable company DVR or a TiVo. InfiniTV installed on your PC essentially replaces your cable set-top box. You might be able to edit some shows but that depends on what digital rights (DRM) are associated with the show. Typically shows will be protected and you will not be able to edit them. The DRM is set by the cable operator, not us."

So the way I read this is that, with protected content, I can record it and play it but not edit it. However Camtasia seems to solve that.

mc