Need to capture TV programs, record to DVD.

[jspeicher]

Hello. Not sure how this all works. I searched some posts but found mostly stuff related to VHS to DVD transfers.

I want to capture TV programs/sporting events from my cable tv and edit out commercials and such, and then burn it to DVD with excellent quality.

For instance - football game, edit out commercials, add some menus/chapters, burn onto dvd.

What exactly does a guy need to do this? Is software more important than hardware?

I currently only have a 9700 Pro. Need capture card recommendations!

 

[yukichigai]

If by "high quality" you mean "high resolution", then that's really unexplored territory for me. Not being able to afford Digital Cable or Satellite TV, I haven't really experimented with it much. I know that there are several High-Def capture cards available if you're running XP MCE, but broadcasters like to put in "no-record" signals into certain programs -- Carnivale is a good example -- and I think Football games would fall into that category. (You can record it, but you get a 1-second blue flash every ~8 seconds. Or so I hear) You could try to find non-MCE versions of the cards -- Hauppage (or however they're spelled) used to make a few I think -- and use VirtualDubMod to capture video, but I'm not sure if that will work.

Anyway, I'll stop typing this 1-page essay on how I can't be helpful. Unless you don't mind capturing at non-HD quality. Then I can tell you how to do it easy.

 

[Peter]

For plain TV or any video signal coming from a cable/satellite/whatever decoder, you need a plain PCI TV card, e.g. Lifeview FlyTV Platinum for $38 (newegg). More expensive cards have a realtime MPEG2 encoder chip on the card, and spare the CPU from having to do that. This is handy for MediaCenter PCs, where you typically don't have that much CPU. But if you're going to process the capture later, you better capture uncompressed, native quality.
You're going to need fast and big storage for that as well.

 

[jspeicher]

So I really just need a capture card?

When I say high quality, I basically mean - my burned program looks just like it would if it were on tv originally. Dont' want to lose anything.

 

[yukichigai]

So, just to be sure, you don't have Digital cable, or at least you don't want to capture from a high-def source. Is that correct?

If so, then yes, all you need is a capture card. Making sure you don't lose quality is simply a matter of picking the right capture program. I've typed up the process WAY too much thus far. Just check some of the other threads I posted in, or go here when I've updated the guide with the process from start to finish.

 

[Peter]

Quality loss occurs not in the capturing process as done by the PCI card. Quality loss does occur as you encode the captured stream into an MPEG2/MPEG4/whatever stream to burn on CD or DVD. All the aforementioned formats are lossy compactors - that means on the final media, you're going to trade quality for size.

As long as you're capturing "raw", it's up to you to tweak that dial this or that way before you burn to DVD or (S)VCD. I said that