[MPlayer-users] Which TV card ?

[rcooley]

Rainer Hantsch wrote:
> o  Hardware: PIII-800, 256MB RAM, Asus V7100 PCI with TV-Out. Harddisk is
>    currently 20GB, so data compression should be done on the fly to save
>    space.
> 
> What I want to do:
> o  Recording films from TV to harddisk
> o  Recording must be in full PAL quality, quality shall be same or better as
>    with my (very good) Video-Tape-Recorder, without frame loss.
> o  Sound must be in stereo (I was told that not every TV does stereo)
> o  Scheduled recording (can also be with an 'at' command.
> 
> o  cut out all commercials afterwards (or can some software detect
>    commercials and interrupt recording automatically?)
> o  burn the final file on CD-ROM/DVD-ROM.
> 
> 
> Any suggestion is welcome.

You probably aren't going to have any luck trying to do the real-time 
encoding with mencoder.  I've found it's quite CPU-intensive.  The two 
programs I recomend you check out are NVRec...  The command-line program 
is nuppelrec.  It should be quite fast, although needing a great deal of 
hard disk space.  After that, you can convert it using mencoder in 
non-realtime.  I decided against using it, because the quality isn't as 
good as I would like, it uses a great deal of hard drive space, so 
recording programs several hours long would fill the hard disk I'm 
using, and because it doesn't support a res better than 640x480 for 
NTSC.  Personally, I would suggest spending $100 and getting a hardware 
MPEG2 card instead of requiring a major CPU to do a simple job. 
Software still isn't all that good at realtime tasks.