Whats a good solution for a 500mhz system for video/audio recording?

[Jwyatt]

Hey,
I have a customer that wants to record from thier cable tv. Mostly what they want is a way to record "Big Band" music from one of the cables channels. They want the video so they can record a few hours of music and video to see what they recorded to label them and convert it to mp3 or cd audio for listening later.

Its an older couple and they really arnt consearned about having the best of the best.

I didnt check to see if the system has agp or not. So if you could suggest a pci or agp solution it would be great. I do know they are using a pci video card now.

 

[Torghn]

I'd get an ATI TV-wonder card. It's a PCI card so you can just plug it in and use the current video card. If you want a video card, I think you can find one of the orriginal All-in-Wonder PCI cards pritty cheap. Either way, ATI makes the best TV tuner cards. If they want to run it through a TV or vcr first then any card with TV in (there are hundreds and hundreds) would work.

 

[Jwyatt]

Would a tv tuner be the best bet? I was thinking of letting them use the cable box and running a patch cable to thier computer. Its only a few feet away, and thats how he's doing his audio now. He just wants to be able to get the video. I think all his pci slots are taken atm so its probably going to have to be a video card with the video in on it. How much HDD space will a few hours of recording take up anyways?

 

[Torghn]

I'd just use the TV in video card, by far the cheapest way to go.

It all depends on the codec you use and the quality the video is, you can get an hour and a half of high quality video and audio in less than 700MB , but you'd have to use an MPEG4 compression (and that would take a lot of time on a 500Mhz system). If you're capturing TV quality without any real compression, you can count about 400-500MB for every half hour or so. (I know these number range a lot, but there are a ton of factors).

 

[Jwyatt]

Thanks for the tips.