Recording Satelite TV to your PC..How?

[Roger Sofarover]

Back to the Font(s) of all knowledge.

What is the best way to record several channels at once (if I needed) from satelite TV to my PC? Is their a 'best' file format to use? Also is anyone aware of an editing program to use so that I could scroll through the file and chop out all the bits of the program I don't want. This is not for commercial or public use. Thanks

[Parapunter]

To receive, decode & record a tv transmission, you will need an appropriate tv card. Since they come in different flavours for different broadcast formats - terrestriial analogue, freeview digital etc. you would need to be careful to choose the right one for your satellite. Dual tuners are widely available and ceratinly within the later iterations of ms media centre, multiple tuners are supported.

Start with Hauppauge, Terratec, Dvico and Pinnacle. Personally, I've always used hauppauge cards and have been very pleased with them.

As for editing, I'm not so certain. My guess would be it could be done with standard editing software, provided it will accept the input file format that your card will use, since tv cards often record into mpeg-2 file format, I can't see why something as basic as Windows movie maker shouldn't fit the bill - again the key would be to do your reading before parting with cash as 'should' is an overused word in computers...


Edit to say: I don't use satellite tv personally, but from memory, I think there may be an issue processing multiple broadcasts simultaneously - I.e. you need a satellite box per channel, which obviously is prohibitive. I could be wrong and things may have changed, but IIRC thta is the case in the uk. Check out the greenbutton.com or av forums for the answers - acres of detail in those places.

[Bushfiva]

There's nothing to stop you adding multiple tuner cards to your PC, other than available slot space. There are cards out there that are themselves dual tuners. Then you probably need some PVR software. There's a few options out there depending on your OS. I'm using Mediaportal right now, I don't particularly like it or dislike it. Depending on where you live, it can pull in electronic program guides (as can most of the other products).

Recording doesn't take much CPU power, but you do want a nice fast hard drive if you're recording more than a couple of programs at once.

If the recorded format is MPEG2, there's again plenty of software that can edit it, including what comes free with Windows. I've found that sometimes recorded files can contain glitches that make editing software fall over. Therefore I use a cheap prog called VideoReDo: at the simplest level, it can simply fix glitches. But it's also a very fast, if simple, editor giving you frame-by-frame control. Finally, it does advertisement detection. There are plenty of alternatives out there.

One of the many PVR forums would probably have better info.

[Parapunter]

The issue with Satellite I.e. Sky, is not a specific tv card, rather the skybox itself. As I understand things, they will only process the signal from one channel at a time, thus to record two channels simultaneously, two skyboxes are required.

You can use multiple tv cards simultaneously, using the proprietary software. However, the one catch is in xp versions of media centre - to use more than one dual tuner, you need to use a registry hack. I'm guessing you don't have media centre in mind, so no problem.

[Bushfiva]

Well yes for Sky it's basically one box per channel, dual or quad LNBs and pull the composite video off or something, I'd guess. But if you're just talking about DVB-S, there's lots of stuff out there including the Nova S Plus and HVR-3000 (which is DVB-S, DVB-T, analog & radio.)

[Parapunter]

Yeah, that's what I was driving at. The op asked for simultaneous broadcast recordings ex Satellite. I reckon that may be a tricky one to achieve. DVB-S & DVB-T are much frindlier in that respect.