Video Asylum

TVs, VCRs, DVD players, Home Theater systems and more.

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PC solution

Posted by blue_z on May 6, 2008 at 02:06:44:
Hi there

One solution for recording OTA HDTV is to use an ATSC tuner with a PC. (Recording digital cable is a bit more problematic, especially HD cableTV.) The ATSC tuners are available as internal PCI or PCI-e cards, as USB dongles and as an Ethernet device; costs vary from $30 (on sale or after-rebate) to ~$200. For the rest of the PC hardware, I've gotten $400 systems to record and playback HDTV. Expect to spend more (and have fewer choices) if you want to connect the PC to the display using HDMI; VGA and DVI are the easiest methods. The software costs vary from free to ???, and the OS could be Linux, WinXP or Vista (I'm totally unfamiliar with Mac). Integrating everything together could take a half-day to forever, depending on knowledge, luck, skill, karma, help from friends and forums.

Regarding the disk storage requirement: the 9 gigabytes per hour storage number is related to the total bandwidth available to the broadcaster. There is some software that records this entire transport stream, but then there are also a lot of recording software that demultiplexes the received data streams and only writes to disk the video and audio streams of the specified subchannel. So a recording of tonight's 60-minute episode of "House" used 7.0 gigabytes. That's a big recording (high bit rate), since some other broadcasters such as KABC-DT tend to use lower bit rates; "Lost" is usually just over 5 GB. (Both are broadcast at 720p video resolution, but obviously use different bit rates.)

Regards