tv capture/PVR system

[kingkano]

Greets all.

I have just built a system I hope to make into a PVR system. I have ntl cable and I note alot of the current TV cards state 125 channel cable ready, can they actually tune into cable channels independantly of the cable box? or am I being deceived lol....

Secondly, the card I am particularly interested in is the ATI AIW 8500 - has anyone got this card and can say anything about it - good or bad. How is the capture quality?? What are your system specs and do they cope well enough??

I have been happy so far with TV out on a very cheap card I bought (radeon 7000) so I imagine its even better at that?? It's mainly the NTL PVR function I am curious about!

thanks for help in advance

kingkano

[D_D]

I have the setup you describe. IE PC with AIW8500DV and NTL. However I have not yet got round to testing the capture on this card (due to having to move all the kit down 2 flights of stairs). Will try and do it soon and report back. :)

[Rav H]

What software are you planning to use for PVR?

I've been playing around with iuVCR. My specs are Duron 950, 256 PC100 ram, IBM30GXP, WinXP SP1.

I use the HuffYUV filter to do colour space compression, and also add a deinterlace filter too.

I'm recording at 384x288 25fps in realtime through a 1-pass Divx filter set to 1700kbps. Audio is recorded at 16bit stereo, 44kHz which I later convert to MP3.

So far this setup seems to work quite nicely, and I'm quite happy with the realtime encoding. There's no loss of lip-sync either. I am a bit intrigued by some of the Linux projects out there, like KVCR. Also, there's the nice possibility of getting a Digital TV PCI card and saving the MPEG2 stream directly without any analogue conversion :D

let me know if you want any URL's for the above


oh yeah, I'm on NTL digital cable and use a composite connection to a wintv card

[ 04 November 2002: Message edited by: Rav H ]

[protactin]

Hmm I've got NTL digital cable and have it plugged into my TV tuner card via composite cable but I can't tune into NTL channels independently.. it needs the decoder to descramble the channels etc I guess.. :(