Re: Replay TV- almost! Coming soon to Dixons!

[Raymond <Reb.barnett@xxxxxxx>]

I looked into this a couple of weeks ago. My findings were:

The ATI All-in-Wonder 128 appears to be the only card with a TV tuner
that will encode directly to MPEG2 on the fly, and is hardware assisted
so you don't need too beefy a Pentium. I never got a definitive answer,
but it looked as though it would only work with Windows 9x, not NT.

Matrox also make a card, and I forgotten its name. This encodes on the
fly to MJPEG which is a lot bigger than MPEG2 (although more editable,
so great for video editing) - you have to use an additional utility to
encode captured files to MPEG2, which uses the main processor so
probably isn't real time.

Other points to bear in mind - a lot of TV is MPEG2 encoded at some
point in its life, even if you watch it via analogue. If you re-encode
it to MPEG2 in your PC, there is a risk that you'll get some nasty MPEG2
artifacts, because the compression is very lossy and different encoders
use different algorithms.

Consequently I've decided to wait. Hauppage's US site list a digital TV
tuner suitable for the UK, but provide not details of price or
when/where to buy it. This strikes me as the best approach since then
all you're doing is recording an already encoded MPEG2 stream to disk.

Hope this helps,

Ray.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Harrison, Mark (Alliance) [mailto:Mark.Harrison@xxxxxxx]
> Sent: 03 February 2000 17:42
> To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
> Subject: [ukha_d] Re: Replay TV- almost! Coming soon to Dixons!
>
>
> Doesn't one of the "all-in-one" graphics cards with tv-tuner
> come with the software to do this?
>
> Failing that, how about a video capture card (Miro?) plugged
> into the composite-out from a satellite/cable/digibox, and a
> PC-based IR controller to hop channels.
>
> (And yes -  I know there's no composite out, but
> SCART+Solder=solution)
>
> Mark Harrison
> European IT Manager, BP/Bovis Alliance
> Tel : +44 7010710239
> Fax: +44 20 8423 7711
> SMTP: Mark.Harrison@xxxxxxx
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nigel Orr [mailto:nigel.orr@xxxxxxx]
> Sent: 03 February 2000 13:45
> To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
> Subject: [ukha_d] Re: Replay TV- almost! Coming soon to Dixons!
>
>
> At 13:34 03/02/00 +0000, I wrote:
> >http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns2224195
>
> More info at http://www.purediva.com, manufactured by
MGI-
> http://www.mgisoft.com
>
> No mention of any suppliers other than Dixons, which isn't so
> inspiring...
> needs a 500MHz Pentium III, 128MB RAM, Windows 98 etc etc, basically a
> current standard spec machine (won't run on my 486 then  :-( ).
>
> An optional IR controller is also available.
>
> Nigel
>
>
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