Newbie question: How to capture TV the right way?

[Pete]

I see it's easy to capture something off TV with my new ATI AIW 9500,
but I don't know if I'm getting the best video that I can yet not
wasting any disk space. Is there any tutorial in the web that shows
me how to do that? I intend to capture lots of MTV songs off cable TV
in the best quality that I can achieve. Any suggestions? Thanks.

 

[T Shadow]

I see it's easy to capture something off TV with my new ATI AIW 9500,
but I don't know if I'm getting the best video that I can yet not
wasting any disk space. Is there any tutorial in the web that shows
me how to do that? I intend to capture lots of MTV songs off cable TV
in the best quality that I can achieve. Any suggestions? Thanks.

digitalfaq.com

 

[Richard Amirault]

"Pete" wrote ...

I see it's easy to capture something off TV with my new ATI AIW 9500,
but I don't know if I'm getting the best video that I can yet not
wasting any disk space. Is there any tutorial in the web that shows
me how to do that? I intend to capture lots of MTV songs off cable TV
in the best quality that I can achieve. Any suggestions? Thanks.

You want the "best qualtiy" but you don't want to "waste disk space". As
the quality increases so does the disk space required to store it. How good
a quality is sufficient? That only you will be able to determine. If all
you will be doing is viewing the videos on your computer then the quality
can be lower than if you burn it to a DVD and view on a large screen TV.

Also, don't overlook the possiblity of buying a bigger hard drive, or
burning all those videos to DVD and not having them on a HD at all.

 

[John Russell]

I see it's easy to capture something off TV with my new ATI AIW 9500,
but I don't know if I'm getting the best video that I can yet not
wasting any disk space. Is there any tutorial in the web that shows
me how to do that? I intend to capture lots of MTV songs off cable TV
in the best quality that I can achieve. Any suggestions? Thanks.

The digitisers on graphics cards are basic devices. They require software
run by the CPU to compress the video into a useful format. That means
quality is dependent upon the power of the CPU and the quality of the
software. The supplied capture software will be cheap and you may find
other packages will work better.

You do have a trade off to make. Low compression formats require less CPU
but require higher disk speeds (and higher space!) to avoid lost frames.
Higher compression formats require more CPU time but result in less data
being transferred to the disk.
You should be able to capture to DVD quality MPEG2's with the right
combination of cpu and software.

 

[pjp]

I assume capturing will be using standard cable/sat type input, e.g.
standard tv/vcr and not hdtv? That said, all you really need to worry about
is "do I have enough free disk space to capture at 'x/y' (480x480 I find
fine) resolution to a lossless codec (e.g. uncompressed, huffman etc.)
without dropping frames at 30fps full stereo". If the answer is Yes than
anything else can be done later, e.g. convert to Divx etc. You can save
space (and time) capturing directly to whatever "codec" format you want,
depends upon what you want to do with it. Upping res gains little as it just
becomes a blowup of tv's NTSC/PAL resolution so what's the point, just make
window larger when playing back amounts to same thing. For DVD's etc. don't
play and capture but instead rip them (put DVD drive in pc if neccessary) as
that quality can't be beat.