record tv to my pc?

Factual Questions
1

Well I lost my VCR in the divorce and don’t have enough money for a dvd-ram or scenium yet. I’m thinking of hooking my tv up to the pc via a tv tuner card and trying to record shows to my hard drive that way.
Has anyone done this preferably in a Windows 98 environment or something similar? If so, do you have any recommendations for i/o card or software?

This is for personal use only, I don’t plan to burn cds/dvds/vcds and will more than likely not even save them after watching since I get bored watching something more than once.
I know vcrs are cheap now but I hate to buy one since I will eventually get something like the RCA Scenium.

2

Showshifter seems to do it. Sorry about the divorce.

3

I’ve never heard of that Showshifter program, but why pay for it when you can get programs that do the same thing for free?

VirtualDub is a great freeware program that has all the advertised features of Showshifter and a whole lot more. You can edit video and even install free filters that denoise, blur logos, and all kinds of other effects. See the capture guides at http://www.vcdhelp.com for more information.

As far as TV cards go, any cheap one should do. The Hauppauge WinTV line has some good cards. It’ll probably cost you between $40 and $100, depending on what features you want. There are some that cost several hundred dollars, but only because they include things like expensive bundled video editing software, which you won’t need.

If you only plan to watch the shows once and are unconcerned about quality, you can capture straight to Divx or MPEG. This will make ugly, blocky-looking videos because the computer is compressing on the fly. Due to the large amount of processor time the compression takes, your video may also be prone to dropped frames. It’s best to not even attempt this option if your computer is slower than 1GHz.

Alternatively, you can capture to RGB, YUY2, or a semi-lossless codec like HuffyUV. These options will make HUGE files (30-50 GB/hour) which you must then convert to a Divx or MPEG. Unfortunately, even my Athlon XP 1800 isn’t fast enough to view the huge HuffyUV files directly without skipping.

The conversion is a time-consuming process; it takes me about an hour and a half to encode a 30 minute show on my computer. However, this produces much better quality in the end and is the method recommended by just about everyone.

A final option would be to buy a hardware encoder that can produce somewhat comparable results to software encoding, only in realtime. I mentioned this last because it’s probably out of your price range. Hardware encoders usually run anywhere from $600 to $15,000, sometimes even more.

4

Oh, I should also mention that if you go the software encoding route, you can get away with using a slower computer. Any slower than 400MHz and you’re pushing your luck, though.

5

I’ve had a Hauppauge WinTV card for a couple of years and have been mostly pleased with it. It comes with software to record incoming TV signals, however you can’t do delayed recording like you can with a VCR. I was going to suggest WinVCR by Cinax but it looks like they’ve been bought up and their product revamped. Go to Download.com and search for “VCR” (the link is already at the search results). You might find something there to suit your tastes if you won’t be home to hit the record button at the right time.

6

Thanks for the info guys. Sounds like I would have to upgrade my current PC quite a bit to make this worthwhile since I only have a PIII 350 right now.
I wasn’t thinking about that. Guess it’s time for a new VCR. :slight_smile:
neutron star,
how does the quality of your recordings compare to what Panasonic’s dvd-ram would do or RCA’s Scenium?
I wonder, if I did have the money, would it be worthwhile to build my own tv-recording PC with a good tv card and hard drive? I guess one thing that bothers me about the dvd-ram is their hard drives probably are not upgradeable although they say you can fit 30 hours on a 40 Gb drive. Is that because they use a different codecs?

7

If you’re a dedicated hobbyist, then a Home Theatre PC can give you definite edge in power, configurability and quality. However, a decent rig can get quite expensive. For more information than you could ever hope to absorb, check out the “Home Theatre Computers” section of the AVS Forum. If your budget is limited, it’s probably not your best option.

Although underpowered for decent software capture, your system should be fine if you use a TV card with hardware encoding. A 7200 rpm hard drive is also a plus. You can read user reviews and comments at VCD Help.

8

I’m not sure I understand this question. A DVD-RAM drive is a storage device; it’s not recording anything. Scenium is a line of HDTVs. I’m not sure what this has to do with recording video.

I will, however, advise that you do not buy a DVD-RAM drive. It has the least hardware compatability of the DVD recordable standards. You’d be better off with a DVD-R or DVD+R. These are competing standards. There may be a burner or two out there that does both, though.

Huh? Now you really lost me. Perhaps a link to the product in question? We must be thinking of different things. A DVD-RAM is a DVD burner that fits into your computer’s tower and is the size and shape of a regular CD-ROM drive. It doesn’t have a hard drive.

Are you thinking of Tivo, maybe? The “30 hours/40GB” figures make me think this is the case. If so, it’s something I’d recommend, at least from what I’ve read about it.

Unlike a computer or hardware encoder that receives a huge ~50GB/hour blast of data and then compresses it, Tivo saves the already-compressed MPEG2 that the satellite dish is feeding to your receiver. This will result in better quality than recompressing the stream with software or hardware. What you record with Tivo will be, bit-for-bit, exactly what you’re seeing while watching live TV.

9

sorry, neutron star I wasn’t clear in my last post.
I was thinking of a particular Scenium product, model DRS7000N, it’s sorta like Tivo except that you don’t have a service to buy.
Panasonic also has a similar thing model DMR- HS2 but the msrp is about $400 higher. The main difference I see is that the Panasonic does dvd-ram and dvd-r recording and RCA’s digital media recorder doesn’t do that I think.

10

Wow, that’s pretty cool, breaknrun. I didn’t even know those products existed. I wonder how long it’ll be before the entertainment industry tries to tear Panasonic a new one for making the illegal distribution of TV shows on the Internet that much easier.

Burn to DVD-R->Stick DVD-R in computer and copy->Repeat

Easy.

11

I use AVI_IO for scheduled recordings, works fine. And regarding MPEG vs. huffYUV, a good halfway-house is MJPEG, such as PICVideo. I can record at 640x480 resolution, pretty good quality, on an old Celeron 400 PC, using about 2.5Gb/hour. A lot, but much less than huffYUV would use.
I’ve also set it up as a sort of “poor man’s Tivo” by using the excellent Digiguide’s (UK only atm but US version imminent) export facility to generate scheduling files. The PC just sits there filling up its hard disk with whatever programmes I select in Digiguide, it’s great!