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In Reply to: RE: Looking for a way to record HD OTA broadcasts. posted by clarkjohnsen on May 05, 2008 at 09:19:01
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
Follow Ups:
z
Hi there
You haven't mentioned a budget or skill level, but some people like this pre-built home-theater PC:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0010DSDXM
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=972427
Regards
x
Hi there
The AVS discussion is mostly on the combo Blu-Ray/HD-DVD drive that this PC has. The people who frequent the HTPC forums tend to favor the "latest and greatest". If you mention HDTV, the majority will start discussing digital cable and tend to ignore OTA. The fact that this PC has an NTSC/ATSC tuner is irrelevant to most of the posters.
For a lower price, HP does have models without the hi-def optical drive. The components you do want are Vista Media Center, the ATSC tuner and the nVidia 8500 video card.
Regards
x
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