t.v. programs to c.d.

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Could anybody let me know how to record programs on t.v. (especially cable t.v.) onto CDs?

Thank you

-- George Thomas (geotom@mbox5.singnet.com.sg), September 05, 2000

Answers

George,

Using a capture card and almost all free software I have been archiving 1 hour shows to CD that play back in my set top DVD player. I'm going to assume you are looking to do something similar. Personally I use the SVCD format as it's almost 4x the resolution of VCD and fits 45-50 minutes of video per disk no problem.

I'm using VirtualDub to capture to a LARGE avi. The codec I use is either Pic video mjpeg ( free for personal use ) or huffyuv ( free GPL ). I then use the linear editing portion of virtual dub to edit commercials and filter the source. I then pipe the output to Tmpeg.

Tmpeg ( freeware ) is a mpeg1/2 encoder that is by far the best quality/bit for any mpeg1/2 encoder I've seen. bbMPEG produces better output, but takes 10x as long. I use the SVCD templates for the most part with only minor modifications.

I then drag the resulting mpeg's into nero ( 30 day trial ) and burn. I can pop this into my pioneer 333 and enjoy high quality playback of my favorite shows.

As always YMMV, I'm a quality freak so keep that in mind. My system is a PIII 700 w/128mb and 40GB+ free space. I regualrly do 2 hours of transcoding a day. If you are looking for something less taxing, repeat the above process with VCD as the output. If you are really lazy you can get a Realtime vcd encoder ( powervcr / ati ) and then just edit and burn the resulting mpeg's.

Good starting point

http://www.vcdhelper.com/

-- eric (eric@nospam.snowmoon.com), September 06, 2000.


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