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I want to record TV programs w/o VCR; what are the options.

B

bupkus

Diamond Member
I want to record TV programs w/o VCR; what are the options.

I suppose I should trip over to BestBuy and actually see the quality of what they call TIVO.

I have a LEADTEK WINFAST "DELUXE" TV2000XP TV/FM MULTIMEDIA CARD that I bought almost a year ago. I installed it into a pc w/ an AMD 2000+ XP processor and 512MB of DDR but I'm not impressed with the 'stutter' effect of any recorded playback. I tried "Optimal" quality settings in mpeg1 and 2 and then the lowest "normal" settings but I still get a stutter. The video card is a MadDog GeForce4 440SE I just got, but like I said, it doesn't stutter except on either time-shifting or recorded playback.

I wonder what TIVO is like. :frown:
 
shouldn't stutter, esp for mpeg 1 or 2 recording unless your playing games or something while trying to record. xp 2000+ is enough to compress video on the fly, something musta been wrong. use good software like cyberlink powervcr or windvr or a few others that are out there.
 
I have an old Panasonic ReplayTV and wouldn't give it up. Highly recommend a DVR. TiVo was too dumbed down for me. ReplayTV's are still available now, just under a different brand (SonicBlue, I think).
 
If you have an ATi card (or even if you don't) try their multimedia center app.

Another good free tool for capturing is virtualdub.
 
TiVo is awesome! DirecTiVo is even better! 🙂

Seriously, I would be quite sad if someone took my TiVo away.
 
The family bought my dad a TiVo for christmas a few years back. We picked up a refurbed unit and made a project out of adding an 80 gig drive to it. My dad is very happy with the TiVo for Home Theater use. The only sad thing is that he's putting things on tape if he really wants to save something. He knows there's ways to get the digital content off the tivo, but I don't think it's straightforward enough to make him want to do it.

Being jealous and wishing I could get my own tv shows, I invested in snapstream pvs software and a LeadTek 2000XP card. That card is ok for 320X240 but you really need to go hardware encoding to get 640x480 dimensions.

I just invested in mwave's $137 Hauppauge WinTV PVR250 card and it's amazing. I can record my shows at highest quality without issue. Playback at the same time (the Snapstream LiveTV feature) does stress the P3 1.1 GHz cpu, but it's able to handle it ok with a 3rd party codec. Before, I had encoding artifacts, now, the picture is near flawless.... perhaps due to the resolution bump but it wasn't because the CPU was at 100% usage.

My suggestion, if you're going to go computer route, Snapstream is a nice product that can be used on your main PC (if you get the PVR 250 or 350/hardware based encoding card). If you go the PC route and are serious about wanting to perhaps save these shows on dvd-r or cd-r, skip the software encoding cards (WinTV FM, 2000XP, etc) as the $40-80 would be better spent on the hardware card. I have both the WinTV-FM card and the 2000XP card and now I have the PVR-250 card... I really wish I'd just bought the hardware card to begin with... would have been so much easier.

FWIW, snapstream.com will sell a bundle of the PVR-250 and their software for like $150.
 
if you want reliability, i'd get a tivo. trusting that your pc won't crash or do smoething crazy while recording a scheduled program... its not fun.
 
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