On Thu, 25 Oct 2001, Largo Hellenz wrote: > I would like to know if it is possible to record cable tv/radio onto hard > drive. the idea is that if i was ever not home, and in danger of missing > something really good, i could just ssh in and start recording.... or just > sell my vcr in favor of crond :) > > What would be a good cable TV card to get started with and what would be a > good software package to encode/compress with? I do this - any many others do too. I use an ordinary Hauppauge WinTV card (actually - I have two) and use mp1e, which is part of rte, which is part of zapping, for my recording. I capture to mpeg1 - 352x288 resolution at 2.5Mb/s data rate gives a very good quality capture, 720x576 at 6Mb/s gives really excellent capture. Quality of received video makes a big difference: my video comes off a digital tv receiver as composite. To do it this brute force way you do need a pretty strong CPU. Mine is 1.13GHz, but I reckon 600MHz or so would do. There are cards with hardware compression (eg DC10+ and suchlike) which will allow use with a slower CPU, but I'm convinced that the dumb card + fast cpu + software approach is more versatile and all-round better. Other capture software is around: ffmpeg, NVrec - I just find mp1e keeps good audio/video sync, mpeg1 works well for me "TV quality" application. Hope that helps, Steve
