HDTV Recording & Audio synchronization issues with long videos

[Boze]

Part One:
My girlfriend and I recently got interested in The O.C. - so I bought the Season One DVD set... once we finished it, we wanted to catch up to Season Two, so we've been downloading recorded AVIs, supposedly from HDTV sources (they are 1.78:1 in format and all had the "Available in FOX High Definition where available" blurb). The problem is audio... it seems like after awhile the audio and video aren't syncing together perfectly. The audio is synched for about the first 5 to 10 minutes of the episode or so, and then goes to crap - while all it takes is a quick reward in Windows Media Player 10 to resync the audio, I'm curious why I have to do this; I have a damn fast system designed for performance from the case and power supply all the way up (click on system link for specifics).

Part Two:
Now that she (and I..., admittedly) are hooked like crack addicts, I want to be able to archive the rest of the shows until Season Two comes out on DVD or HD-DVD and when Season Three starts this November. I know that I'll probably need an ATI HDTV Wonder or similiar card... so I'm asking for recommendations on cards capable of recording from an HDTV signal directly to the hard disk, along with a general idea of how much space I can expect to use per episode (60 minutes initially, around 42 to 44 once I edit out the commercials and crap).

Please understand that space is not an issue at all... if I have to buy another six 74 GB Raptors and another PowerStream 600 to throw in the bottom of this Stacker case to store this... then I'll place the order at ZipZoomFly tomorrow; if I need more space and higher speed hard disks then I'll go pick up an Ultra320 SCSI controller card and as many Seagate X15 drives as it takes... What can I say, I'm hooked!

 

[SynthDude2001]

I've recently purchased this HDTV tuner card. You may or may not want one that expensive - its main advantages are that it can tune QAM (unencrypted HD over cable; not just OTA/antenna) and that it has a hardware decoder (so very little CPU utilization when copying a stream to disk).

I've read that an OTA stream will take up ~8.5GB per hour, while a QAM stream could take up double that (19GB/hr), due to there sometimes being two separate streams on one channel. I haven't personally verified this, because to be honest I don't have any free drive space. But I also don't really have a whole lot to record yet (I go to school in an area that isn't the best for HD, although it's improving).

 

[rbV5]

I will warn you up front that editing the commercials from HD TS files will be the most frustrating part of what you want to do.

I've used both a hardware and software HDTV cards, and both can work well, and both can be incredibly frustrating. Currently, I prefer the HDTV Wonder in MCE 2005. The recordings are excellent, and the audio is perfectly synced throughout. The signal itself probably has a lot to do with how you'll enjoy OTA HDTV, mine is very good, I live about 20 miles from the towers. Go to antennaweb.org to see whats available for your area and the distance to the towers.

1 hour at 720p (I cleaned up my recorded TV folder, and I've only got on HD file apparently) was close to 9 GB

I like MCE 2005, because the HD is supported with the EPG, which makes capturing a series easy. Its also easy to navigate your recordings for playback. Its just a part of my Media Center though, so maybe you could get by with less.

My MyHD MDP100 hardware card is nice as well. It has good community support, and the software continues to be updated, as well as the hardware (up to mdp130 now like the previous poster) Playback is great since it uses the Zoran decoder chip instead of your CPU, and you don't need a fancy grahic card to output to your HDTV, the different models feature HDTV output with various connectors.

It captures the native transport stream to the hardisk, and the quality is excellent. The scheduler uses TitanTV (last time I used it) which isn't nearly as robust as MCE's EPG, but it can work for what you want to do. The transport streams themselves can carry both the analog+ digital streams and some additional program information, and you can rip them out, convert to MPEG-2 ect.

You can end up with MPEG-2 for editing with either card (even with DVR-MS files) but neither is edit friendly, and re-encoding those streams after editing commercials takes some CPU cycles, lots of time and a stout rig.

I've gone to simply filling up the hardrive and using MCE's skip feature to blow through commercials. I don't have the patience to edit and re-encode, and I rarely watch TV more than once anyway...I just delete the files out of my Library when I'm done watching them, then add a hardrive when it gets filled up. That might change when media is large enough to hold HD material.

 

[Boze]

Well I've got the stout rig... at least I'd like to think so - if I need to go ahead and do some upgrades though (FX-55 processor from 3500+, higher speed and larger capacity hard disks) then they'll be done.

I'd really like to thank the both of you for all the great information you've given me so far, I really think I'm gonna be able to wrangle this under control guys.

 

[rbV5]

You wouldn't need anything that powerful, but take a look at AVSforum HTPC forum and check the HDTV forums there out as well, lots of information you'll want to look at there.

 

[flawlssdistortn]

I downloaded a few episodes of 24 (hdtv as well) and noticed this same issue with the audio and video falling out of sync.