The idea of doing this seems really attractive, but I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not.
I have a Gateway 500SE computer running Windows XP Home on a 1.8MHz Pentium 4. I have USB 2.0 ports and (I think) and 80GB hard drive. It has a DVD-R (not a DVD-RW) and a CD-RW.
I know that there are TV tuners available, but I don’t really want to watch TV on the computer. My dream is to sit down at the computer and point and click the shows I want to record. Then, the computer could save the shows to the HD for me to move later, or it could burn the shows straight to the CD-RW. I believe my living room home theater system (where I will actually watch these shows) can play disks in the VCD format. I just got the HT system, so I’m not yet sure what all it can do (Onkyo LS-V500C).
So…
Do I have enough computer for the job?
Will the CD-RW record disks in VCD?
Hi, Opal.
Will a CD hold all of a TV show or movie?
Will my HD hold the TV show without crowding out all my other stuff?
Am I nuts for even considering this with my current setup?
Is the computer able to perform other functions (Internet, Word, etc.) while it is simultaneously recording a TV program?
Gateway sells a “Media Center” PC, but my budget can’t quite swing it. They sell a TV tuner for around $200 that I could probably afford. I also might be able to add a DVD-RW to the computer, if that’s what it takes to move the shows to the living room.
My goal is ease of operation. I want to click the show I want to record and then forget about it. Weeks later, when I can sit down to watch the show, I want to find it quickly and easily and pop it in the DVD and kick back. Right now, I’ll record a program on the VCR. By the time I get around to watching it (sometimes weeks or even months later) I can’t find it or I can’t remember if I’ve seen that week’s episode or not. Watching Enterprise or West Wing has become such an ordeal!
Thanks to all who respond. The new season of Enterprise and West Wing will soon be upon us.
I’ve got an ATI-Tuner card, and it works pretty good. Mind you, I go the cheapest one of their cards I could, so I can’t say how the more expensive ones perform. My machine is also only a 750 Mhz AMD, so it’s performance is not going to be as good as yours. To answer your questions:
1.) Yes, if you’ve got lots of RAM. Need to know the specs of any cards you’re considering to say for sure, though.
2.) If you’ve got the software for it.
3.) I think even Opal’s tired of that gag now.
4.) It depends upon how long the show is, and what type of compression you’re using. My card apparently encodes everything using a hardware specific key of somesort, meaning that I can’t plop the disk into a DVD player and watch it. Of course, I may need to adjust some settings to correct this.
5.) Provided you’ve got more than 10 gigs of free space (though not much more), yup. Of course, this is also dependant upon the length of the program and the encoding method you’re using.
6.) I am not a mental health professional, so I can’t respond to this question.
7.) Mine isn’t, but then again, my machine is considerably slower than yours. A faster machine would definately increase the odds of it being possible, more RAM (I’ve got 320 Megs) might help as well.
I’m assuming you’ve got some version of XP on your machine. Make sure that any card you consider getting is XP compatible. Don’t assume that because it’s Win2K compatible, it’ll work on an XP machine. My card wasn’t, but I was able to download the correct drivers to make it XP compatible, but it was a royal PITA to do so.
Yes. Try one of the VCD authoring programs [here](http://www.dvdrhelp.com/tools.php#VCD/SVCD Author). Many are freeware. They’ll turn your MPEG into a CD image that you can burn with your CD-R software. If you already use Nero, you can skip this step; Nero has simple VCD authoring built-in.
A fully compliant VCD will hold 80 minutes of video + audio. Depending on whether your DVD player supports it, you can alter the bitrate to increase or decrease that time. Of course, as the bitrate goes down, the quality goes down with it, and vice versa.
It depends. For best quality, you have to encode to a semi-lossless codec which takes up huge amounts of space (think 30GB/hour), then reencode to MPEG (or better yet, MPEG-2 [SVCD,DVD]). If you’re willing to sacrifice quality, you can encode to MPEG in realtime. This will take far less space - 600MB for every 60 minutes. Some of the pricier cards have hardware MPEG encoders onboard, which will reduce strain on your CPU and should produce better results. I’ve never used one of these, though, so I can’t vouch for them. My card is the WinFastTV 2000 XP. It’s about $40 or $50.
A couple of years ago, the results of realtime MPEG encoding were a blocky mess,. With computers as fast as they are now, though, I find the quality to be getting quite acceptable, even without any onboard encoder on my card. My computer is an Athlon 1800, so you should have similar results.
Of course not.
Yes, but bear in mind that it could slightly reduce the quality of your video. Realtime encoding needs every CPU cycle it can get.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.
Might I recommend the “All-In-Wonder” line of video cards from ATI? They come with a TV tuner built-in as wel as Gemstar software, which downloads the latest TV schedules from the Internet. Essentially, it works much like a Tivo or DVR digital cable box. You can also tweak the recording settings to capture raw video or MPEG1 or MPEG2 if you’d prefer. It’s really easy to set up and get going - tweaks can follow later.
Thanks for the info, everyone. I don’t know when I’ll have time for this project, but I hope to look into it. I’m tired of trying to find the right tape and then searching through it to find my show. With the All-in-Wonder, is there a subscription fee as well, like with Tivo? Tivo seems like a good idea, but I object to having to pay a fee every month even after I bought the thing.
Nope, no charge, but for some reason, there’s certain channels that the channel guide won’t recognize. It doesn’t list the History Channel or TechTV, however I can easily watch both of those, and can record programs off of them, provided I’m there to physically “push the button.”