Capturing/ripping Direct TV (or other DBS) stream

[mojo]

I want to make SVCDs out of TV shows that originate from Direct TV. The problem is this is ALREADY a highly compressed MPEG-2 signal, so the thought of captuing it either analog or DV and then recompressing it is not a pretty one.

Is there ANY way I can rip the MPEG 2 stream from the satellite and encode that? Or just burn the original stream? I know that there are Direct TV Tivos that save the stream to the internal hard drive, so it MUST be possible...

Otherwise, what kind of quality are people getting with encoding satellite signals?

[Gazorgan]

Certainly. All you have to do is tap the data stream out of the reciever. Best place is the MPEG2VIDEO chip, it's decoded at that point.

Having said that, the answer is no, unless you are an electrical engineer with a digital speciality. You can get a direct TV with a TIVO built in. Capture then pull the drive (or add a second drive). It uses a Linux filesystem, just copy over the file. This is being done, just search the net.

[energy80s]

Pity you're not in the UK. The PCI cards for the new DTT system allow you to grab the raw data stream straight to the hard drive. This can be re-muxed and written directly onto a DVD, allowing you to archive broadcast quality masters of TV shows! This is what I do. The quality is great.

[ronnylov]

Yes, it is possible in Europe with a DVB-S PCI-card.
I have a DVB-C card and captures from digital cable in Sweden.
There's also DVB-T cards for terrestial digital TV.

Just demux the digital stream (the PVA file) with PVAStrumento and author a DVD, or re-encode to the format of your choise.

[fmctm1sw]

Otherwise, what kind of quality are people getting with encoding satellite signals?

Hmmm, I've been capturing Directv from my box to AVI, then encoding to VCD. I didn't think it looked too bad. Of course, I only require the simplist form of use usually (cartoons for the kids).

[phelix]

I want to make SVCDs out of TV shows that originate from Direct TV. The problem is this is ALREADY a highly compressed MPEG-2 signal, so the thought of captuing it either analog or DV and then recompressing it is not a pretty one.

I do analog captures off digital satellite all the time (echostar in my case) with excellent results. The main trick is to capture using a lossless codec like huffyuv. That way you aren't introducing (many) additional artificats.

Once captured, you'll need to use filters to do two main things:

1) filter out noise from the capturing process
2) get rid of any mpeg artifacts if you can.

The first can be doen with any temporal/spatial smoother or noise reducer. The second depends on the source material. For animated stuff, I like smartsmoother and msharpen to get rid of the blocks. For live stuff, I haven't quite figured it out yet, though often I don't have to do anything special.

Finally, do any color correction you need and run a light unsharp filter to counteract any smoothing you did.

BTW, I though DirecTV was using some bastardized mpeg 1.5 thing, not standard DVB mpeg2. In any case, it's most certainly in a nonstandard resolution. So to make a standards compliant DVD, you'll have to transcode anyway. The only real thing an analog capture will add is a little noise which can be filtered out.

OTOH, I'd love to be able to capture the digital stream directly, if only for the convience of not having to setup an analog capture. It'd sure save time and disk space.

[txpharoah]

I use an ATI AIW 7500 card to capture straight to MPEG2 at 8MPS. Looks perfect. Do it all the time on my DSS TV.