[bettervideo]

I'm interested in setting up a PVR (basic stuff like

pause/rewind live TV, record shows for later), but would

like the option of doing this without compression, since

the signal coming from DishNetwork was already compressed,

and I don't want to add more artifacts (especially if I'm

going to edit out commercials before archiving it).


Is there any PVR software that can handle that?


Would I be better off with two capture cards (one without

compression, one with)? And, while I've heard good things

about the Flyvideo 3000, what's the best hardware MPEG

capture card?


And, yes, I realize that this will take massive amounts of

hard drive space.


Bill

 

[stickman]

Take a look at ShowShifter. You can completely customize how video is captured.

 

[BigAl]

I second showshifter, remote controllable, supports IR blasters, TV friendly UI, DVD, CD, MP3 functionality. Also you may want to look at the MJPEG codec included with SS or HuffyUV (which is lossless). I could not tell the difference between MJPEG at higher settings (18 or above) and uncompressed video capture. CPU usage with either codec is very reasonable. I haven't looked at snapstream lately... it may be worth a look.


For hardware capture cards... I'm pretty happy with my pvr250... although there is a ghosting problem on high-motion content like sports. Other than that the capture quality is very good. When the pvr250 is used with SageTV it's very close to a Tivo or Replay in capture quality and reasonable close with the usability of it's UI.


Al

 

[markdl]

You can also have complete encoding control over SageTV.

 

[BigAl]

markdl, has SageTV added support for non-mpeg2 hardware encoders? Or are you just saying that you can adjust the mpeg2 encoding parameters?


Al

 

[HobbieMan]

I understand that you do not want to compress the video signal that you are getting from your dish netwk/directv receiver, since their satellite feed signals are compressed... And yes you would add ugly artifacts.


However, storing the analog signal (which you obtain from SVideo/rca/component output from a satellite receiver) without compression, sounds pretty unfeasable (or impractical) at the moment. Not because technology is non-existant for that, but because you will need Terabytes of storage space. I can't remember the numbers, but uncompressed video is VERY large, in the range of GIGS per MINUTE!


What would be nice though, would be for you to be able to tap into the unencrypted MPEG2 stream inside the satellite receiver, just before it is sent to the MPEG2 decoder. This way you could store the encoded (but unencrypted) video signal and that only requires about 1 to 2 Gigs per HOUR.


Hobbieman

 

[markdl]

Al, SageTV still requires an mpeg2 hardware encoder. But, we do have control over the encoding parameters. I really love the hardware encoding - SageTV recording away, my hipix recording away, and watching a dvd all at the same time on the same computer. Gotta love that.

 

[e vey]

Completely uncompressed would require huge hard drives, but 640x480 MJPEG at 18 = 8GB per hour of recorded material.