What video card and application to record HD TV on PC?

W

Workbug

I'm a little clueless on this. What new video card and application
can record HD TV on my PC? I tried something with ATI card 10 years
ago, back then it was a hassle. Is it getting any easiler?
 
P

Paul

Workbug said:
I'm a little clueless on this. What new video card and application
can record HD TV on my PC? I tried something with ATI card 10 years
ago, back then it was a hassle. Is it getting any easiler?

At one time, you could get ATI AIW (All-In-Wonder) cards, which
combined a TV tuner, decoder IC, as well as a regular video card
GPU for gaming. ATI did their best, to write their own software,
so there was some semblance of a complete package solution.

Now, they're back to separating the functions. Which means, a
video card is just a video card now. You may not even get a
composite or S-video output on your video card, as the industry
tries to switch to DRM-infested digital only outputs.

TV tuners can come in different forms. Back in the day, a card
with a BT878 would connect to the PCI bus. It would come with
an NTSC or PAL tuner. When recording, you might get 20MB/sec
of uncompressed data, written out to your hard drive. (I still
use one of those cards on a daily basis. It saves turning
on the TV set. We're still using NTSC here.)

Now, you can find PCI cards, but you can also find USB
based devices. And the TV signals have changed to digital
formats. The digital stream sent, contains some kind of
MPEG content (meaning, it is compressed). The advantage of
this, is a USB2 based dongle, has enough bandwidth on the USB
cable, to record the MPEG stream to disk, without breaking
a sweat.

If you needed to bridge the old analog TV world (like I do),
as well as the newer OTA or cable digital, then you'd need
a recording device that handles multiple standards.

For example, I go to the TV tuner section here...

http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=47&name=TV-Tuners-Video-Devices

and select ATSC / CleamQAM / NTSC, to be able to handle both
new digital standards and the old analog. (You can look
all those terms up on wikipedia.org if you want, to understand
what they mean.)

(This is a PCI Express x1 card, for recording TV)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815116015

(This is a USB2 one. When the NTSC signal comes in, it will
be decoded, and then has to be converted by the dongle, into
a compressed format, so it better fits down the USB2 cable
without dropping frames. The dongle tend to run a bit warm,
due to some of the signal processing required.)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815100035

One difference, between a PCI or PCI Express card, versus
a USB2 dongle, is the dongle may only have one TV connector
on it. If you have a cable signal, plus an OTA antenna connection,
the larger add-in cards may have the connectors you need, to allow
multiple inputs. That is one thing you'd be watching for. The
"one input dongle" is good, only if you have a single signal
source.

If you read the reviews on those, or other products, you'll find
a recurring theme is poor software. Read enough of the reviews,
to see if the users have figured out, how to get their money's worth
from the product. The solutions they use, may be a bit convoluted.

On my setup, I use an NTSC analog tuner with a BT878 chip, and
I use a copy of DScaler to control it. Excellent software. I
stopped using the Hauppauge software, years ago, after I tried
DScaler. You can waste a lot of time finding, testing, configuring
the software, to make it work right. So it can be expensive,
in terms of your personal time to get it running well. Now, if
I was to delete my copy of DScaler, I doubt I'd get it set up
exactly the same way, a second time :) My channel changes are
fast, the picture quality is good, so no complaints there. As
far as I know, DScaler is specific to BT878, and isn't a general
purpose application. The reviews on Newegg, will guide you
on the best software to use with your new purchase. It might
just be Windows Media Center, but there are also separate
commercial packages that do an equivalent job (SageTV, MythTV
and so on).

Paul
 
G

Guest

Paul said:
On my setup, I use an NTSC analog tuner with a BT878 chip, and
I use a copy of DScaler to control it. Excellent software. I
stopped using the Hauppauge software, years ago, after I tried
DScaler. You can waste a lot of time finding, testing, configuring
the software, to make it work right. So it can be expensive,
in terms of your personal time to get it running well. Now, if
I was to delete my copy of DScaler, I doubt I'd get it set up
exactly the same way, a second time :) My channel changes are
fast, the picture quality is good, so no complaints there. As
far as I know, DScaler is specific to BT878, and isn't a general
purpose application. The reviews on Newegg, will guide you
on the best software to use with your new purchase. It might
just be Windows Media Center, but there are also separate
commercial packages that do an equivalent job (SageTV, MythTV
and so on).

Paul we have a similar setup: a PVR-150 with DScaler. And you're
right, good thing DScaler is around because Hauppauge's apps and
drivers are awful. We run WinTV only for its LivePreview registry
hack, which outputs a raw signal before it gets eaten by the card's
MPEG2 codec. AFAIK there's no way to get this raw signal to
DScaler or other third-party apps. If I'm wrong about that I hope
someone corrects the info.
 
W

wayneP

?We've been recording OTA HDTV for a couple of years using a KWorld PCI card
but we've gone to a Hauppauge 950Q , a SiliconDust Homerun and a Mygica USB
device all with BeyondTV (similar to SageTV). All these devices also work
with Vista TV pack. The SiliconDust is neat in that you use it over a
network so that any PC on the network can access the programming. The Mygica
is very inexpensive. Meritline frequently has it on special for less than
$20. The 950Q is the most expensive but it comes with software which I have
never been able to get working reliably. All these devices are QAM capable.
i.e. you can receive unencrypted HDTV over cable. However, none of the
devices have worked reliably for us with either BeyondTV or Media Center and
QAM. We keep loosing the QAM mapping with the devices and BeyondTV. We don't
use Media Center; so I can't say how any of the devices work with QAM in
Media Center. Vista TV Pack is supposed to support QAM but I'm not sure to
what extent. Windows 7 Media Center has full QAM support but my wife won't
let me try them on her Windows 7 machine.

Wayne

"Workbug" wrote in message

I'm a little clueless on this. What new video card and application
can record HD TV on my PC? I tried something with ATI card 10 years
ago, back then it was a hassle. Is it getting any easiler?
 
F

Flasherly

I'm a little clueless on this. What new video card and application
can record HD TV on my PC? I tried something with ATI card 10 years
ago, back then it was a hassle. Is it getting any easiler?

Yes, although with software interpreting a capture stream as a norm
and dedicated entertainment industry chips still very expensive, the
base core platform should be less an imposition than any poor software
implementation for capture hardware. I used to play hell keeping the
machine dedicated, those incoming frames properly laid for codec
standard purposes and an audio sync. A couple drivers was all I used
with my card, everything else included was crap compared to adaptable
software I found elsewhere. Nothing else largely disturbing the CPU
and all was usually cool. When it comes to devices, you look over the
names and their boardmakes for what people like and jump in. At some
broadcast engineering subset. Things like Gordian Knot never was
easiler than catching a goose on the loose. DOOM9.net's the video
forum place, used to be.
 

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