What's the way to go about doing this? Recording TV shows

[BrunoPuntzJones]

I've read through a lot of tutorials, but none are real comprehensive. Basically here's what I want to do:

Record show to my hard drive (Have a Hauppauge 250 MCE)
Edit out the commercials
Compress it down to fit on a CD (takes a while, so prefer to do overnight)
Burn to a CD and have it to where it can be played on a DVD player

I guess need to know what programs I need, and how it all works. I have Beyond TV, but can't download the program guide, so going to give Sage TV a try. After that I don't know what to get, what settings to record at, etc. I'd like to keep the quality as high as possible of course.

Any pointers?

 

[rh71]

http://www.dvdrhelp.com - I'm sure you've read through ? I guess they renamed it videohelp.com now.

Before you begin - there's also the decision of what format to capture in the first place - DIVX/XVID is still one of the best, but it's AVI and not many players can play this yet...

What you can do about commercials is use TMPGenc or VirtualDub. There is merge and cut through those tools.

For a CDR, you want the VCD or SVCD formats (MPG) to play on your DVD player. You can use the above tools to convert an AVI to MPG.

Alternatively, you can convert to WMV (WMP9 encoder) as it compresses much better (though somewhat grainy-er) and will play on some players.. dvdrhelp has a list of what players are capable of playing what here.