Building a digital video recorder... any ideas?
01-09-2005, 08:30 PM
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Building a digital video recorder... any ideas?
I was looking at the Panasonic digital video recorder with DVD burner since I'm getting sick of rewinding and fast-forwarding through tapes. Then I saw the fricking price of these things and was turned off by it.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...&s=electronics
Well today I was browsing through the computer section at Circuit City and saw video card where you can hook up your coaxial cable to your computer and record/program to record TV shows. Card was only $100.
I have an extra computer case with harddrive and memory, extra monitor. What else would I need? Would the quality of the shows be good if we watched them off the computer's harddrive? Computer flat screens are cheaper than LCD TVs.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...&s=electronics
Well today I was browsing through the computer section at Circuit City and saw video card where you can hook up your coaxial cable to your computer and record/program to record TV shows. Card was only $100.
I have an extra computer case with harddrive and memory, extra monitor. What else would I need? Would the quality of the shows be good if we watched them off the computer's harddrive? Computer flat screens are cheaper than LCD TVs.
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01-10-2005, 05:26 PM
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the winTV tuner as well as most other cards kick ass for watching tv, but they all kinda suck when it comes to encoding and taping it
the problem is that most of these don''t allow you to use external video/audio encoders to do the taping on the fly (WME, VDuB/NANDuB)
the quality is so-so, it's just alot of annoying if you don't know what you're doing (telecining, interlacing, removing the artifacts of converting to progessive scan) just so you can output it to the TV with a card that transfers it back to those formats anyway.. big headache.... basically, with the price you'll be paying, just get the DVR or DVD-recorder
the problem is that most of these don''t allow you to use external video/audio encoders to do the taping on the fly (WME, VDuB/NANDuB)
the quality is so-so, it's just alot of annoying if you don't know what you're doing (telecining, interlacing, removing the artifacts of converting to progessive scan) just so you can output it to the TV with a card that transfers it back to those formats anyway.. big headache.... basically, with the price you'll be paying, just get the DVR or DVD-recorder
01-10-2005, 05:59 PM
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If you're willing to put a little more time and effort into it, you can have a computer working like a Tivo, only better. There is an application for linux called MythTV that has a tv tuner, tv recorder function that records at full quality and automatically transcodes to whatever format you like (ie. XViD), download tv schedules, schedule recordings like Tivo, rip and burn DVDs, rip and burn audio CDs, and manage your recorded library.
There's a modified Knoppix distribution called KnoppMyth that makes the installation almost brainless -- no interaction with the console if you don't want to. KnoppMyth is free and will work on even an old, slow PC. It also supports many different tv tuner cards including old ass WinTV cards based on the BT484 (Brooktree) chipset. These badboys are cheap on ebay or half.com.
If you already run linux, there are gentoo, debian, and redhat packages for MythTV as well as some of the alternatives including freevo.
There's a modified Knoppix distribution called KnoppMyth that makes the installation almost brainless -- no interaction with the console if you don't want to. KnoppMyth is free and will work on even an old, slow PC. It also supports many different tv tuner cards including old ass WinTV cards based on the BT484 (Brooktree) chipset. These badboys are cheap on ebay or half.com.
If you already run linux, there are gentoo, debian, and redhat packages for MythTV as well as some of the alternatives including freevo.