[thechat] TV Capture (was: ohio state)

[Seb]

>On a related note, I want to rip the game (4.5 hours) off my Tivo.  I
>can send to VCR, so I figure I can get a decent capture card & hard
>drive and burn it on to VCD. Any suggestions on how to do this on $250
>or less?

Wow, sounds like a great game. I kinda wish we got more American Football
over here sometimes, I really miss watching it.

Anyway, the easiest way to do this is go buy a $50 TV tuner/capture card.
Hauppage do some really good ones. Then buy yourself a $200 DVD-R+RW drive.
Make sure you don't make the mistake of buying a drive that is only -R or
only +RW, as the disc formats are incompatible.

Voila, for $250 you have a solution for recording TV onto DVDs. Capture
resolution should be 512x384 at roughly 15fps. At this resolution, an hour
of MPEG-4 video will use up about 500 - 600 MiB, depending on how good your
encoder is. You can drop the resolution down and still get astonishingly
good output on a TV, though forget it for viewing on a PC. Oh yeah,
whatever you do, don't sacrifice framerate or sound quality, as you will
regret it. Be warned, though. Converting straight AVI into MPEG-4 takes a
long time, even on a fast machine.

- seb