Reply 20 of 24, by yawnmoth
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...