windows is weird. I have a Win PVR-250. (have to use experimental IVTV drivers though.
To capture video I go:
cat /dev/video1 > videoname.mpeg2
Of course those make gigantic files, and not all players are capable of playing raw mpeg2 captures. So if I want to convert them to mpeg4 files I'll go something like this:
mencoder videoname.mpeg2 -o videoname.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=1800 -oac lavc
Of course I have that in a script so that I don't have to type out that mess every single time. Mencoder is part of the Mplayer project. That will take something like a 6gig file and compress it down to around 650megs. Of course it isn't DVD-quality anymore, but it's decent enough. The quality is almost infinately modifiable with different codecs, and different algorythms and crap like that. It's actually quite overwelming with all the options.
A person that cared more could spend hours and hours playing around and tweaking it.
Of course that's only usefull with the PVR or PVR-like mpeg2 capture cards.
Also if you didn't know before, mpeg2 is the video compression standard of the industry. DVD's are Mpeg2, Digital cable and satalite are Mpeg2 streams, etc etc etc. It sucks though because each cable company has their own propriatory standards of exactly how they do stuff, so it's impossible to mass-produce a computer card capable of capturing digital cable directly.
Sucks. In Europe they have standards, so that everybody had DVB cards that you can buy for 30-40 dollars that can capture digital cable, satalite, or terrestrial signals (radio.) In the USA they do this so you HAVE to buy/rent their stupid boxes. So to capture digitial cable you have to use the Cable box to convert that regular "channel 4" cable signals, then capture that and convert it back to mpeg2, which is obviously not optimal.
I am hoping that will change with the standardization of HDTV. Of course if you want the best quality possible the only way is thru those gigantic redneck-style satalite dishes to grab the raw analog signals that the cable/digital sattalite companies capture from and retransmit as compressed mpeg2 signals.
Now for "normal" tv capture cards like my ATI Wonder-VE card its a bit different from the mpeg2 cards. It outputs this funky raw format. It needs to be encoded into a different format if you want to play it on a non-tv-capture application.
Mencoder can handle this too, with a command similar to:
mencoder -tv driver=v4l:width=640:height=480 tv:// -o tv.avi -ovc raw
I'd never tried it with my card. I don't think it would be that easy exactly since my card doesn't output any sound. Instead you have to take a line out from that tv capture card and take a little wire and stick it into the line-in on my sound card.
Plus that uses lots of CPU cycles. High quality captures using Divx5 mpeg4 captures are hard to keep going in real-time. Those Mpeg2 capture cards are nice because they are completely in hardware, so use very little cpu time, but they also cost more. One interesting thing is that those little Via mini-ITX boards with those slower low-power CPU's have on-board Mpeg2 DEcoding hardware stuff, so that you can get nice DVD playback on those slow things. Nice stuff actually. Mpeg2 capture cards on those make a nice little PVR boxes with stuff like MythTV.
That's what I get for being cheap, though. Mine is the cheapo model, then regular ATI Wonder (NOT the All-in-Wonder, ATI/3D/Video/TV In/out. Those use ENTIRELY different setups and don't work to hot in Linux), will capture the sound too and not just the video.
Then there are nice GUI tools for using this stuff, but I don't do this stuff very often so it's not worth it to install them. Bash scripts are good enough for me.
MythTV is a nice app that turns your computer into a PVR. It can record and save shows for you. VideoLan Server (not the client) can take the mpeg2 card output and retransmite it out over your network. Nice for video confrencing over a LAN with, but can handle DVDs, avi files and lots of different files. The VideoLan client is aviable for Windows for receiving these signals, but most media players should be able to do it too. The VLC thing should be able to broadcast stuff over lans itself, but it's capabilities is somewhat more limited then the Server versions.
Of course all this isn't going to help you out much since all this crap is Linux-centric. But if anybody was wondering about it....
What settings do they use? I am using Winfast PVR and I would appreciate any suggestions you have. 
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