In any case, I like to encode to HuffYUV lossless video, then clean it up and convert it to DivX5 later.

Unlike my current TV card, my old one could capture uncompressed, so that it could be recompressed on the fly. Also, the TV software that came with my old TV card didn't split avi's at the 2gb limit, so capturing anything longer than x minutes was impossible, pretty much. Virtual Dub is supposed to be able to capture from TV cards, but... with Virtual Dub, I always lost frames, and could never get the audio in sync, anyways. There were a few other apps I tried like AVI_IO, but that never worked, either. The best solution I had was the software that came with the card, and even that was lacking...

So I've had bad experience with capturing with a TV card that can have the TV stuff be recompressed on the fly, although it may just be that my TV card sucked.

Also, for the commercial skipping... i looked into it, and it is Replay TV by sonicblue. but apparently it's version of ad skipping is to skip 30 sec, when you push some button... oh well.. my personal theory was that the closed caption data would be different, but i guess not...

Yeah, I was thinking about the closed captioning synch, but that would be rather inconsistent because no matter how much the ADA pushes, not all programmes are captioned.

As much as I hate the crappy resolution I get with S-Video (240px vertical! AGH! *dies*) I love my capture card. Now I need to lobby ATi to have a fixed aspect ratio switch between 4:3 and 16:9 (since my local FOX syndicate has started broadcasting in EDTV, yay!, window resizer programs fuck up because of the custom skinjob ATi has for their program, and because it's pretty hard to eyeball the exact proper aspect ratio.)

Anyway, yeah. GIMME A DTV CAPTURE CARD, DAMMIT!

Nicht Sehr Gut wrote:

Not so sure of that, "Replay TV" is supposed to have that feature (and is apparently in a legally unstable position because of that).

The latest 4x00 and 5000 models have "Commercial Advance(R)" which lets you choose to skip commercial breaks all-together when you playback recorded shows. "No fast forward, no remote control interaction at all. Just a split-second "blip" and you're right back into the action."

I believe it still records them, though.

See?
http://news.google.com/news?q=%22skip+commercials%22

Not sure about your 3 dB thing, though.

Hi,

I've always thought that Hauppauge are famous because of their quality and customer support. Therefore, I've always bought all my TV cards from them.

My first Hauppauge TV Tuner had the left audio channel broken, and it only output audio through the right channel. It was very annoying.

The second showed excessive "tearing" effect on the upper half of the screen. It could easily make you feel sick after a few minutes of watching.

And the card I'm currently using (Hauppauge WinTV-Nexus-s) works more or less well at last! But the truth is that it didn't work until I applied a special registry patch which cured the horrible distortion that made the right half of the screen unviewable.

But I'm largely disappointed with the Satellite Operators. I receive French, Spanish, Dutch and German channels, but almost nobody broadcasts channels using Progessive Frame format. All of them are interlaced, and they look ugly in the PC. Really ugly.

I'm still waiting for the day when all TV channels are Progressive (maybe the next century, too bad I'll be dead by then) 🙁

Ciao.

The highest progressive-scan resolution is 1024 horizontal. 1920x1440 (true HDTV) is interlaced.