Hi all. I have cable TV provide by Blueyonder. My computer is setup with Win 2K and a Voodoo 3 3500 TV card which can accept a composite input. Is there any way I can route the output of the cable box to the TV card and my TV at the same time so I can record TV on my computer. Either that or I notice that I have 2 scart sockets on the back of my TV . One has an arrow going into and out of it, the other has an arrow going out only. Would I be able to plug a scart to composite lead into the second scart socket and use this to provide the signal ? Or is there such a thing as a scart doubling adapter that will allow me to route the output of the cable box to the TV and computer at the same time ? Many thanks in advance to all who offer suggestions.
What you do is Connect the cable into a Cable Box or VCR and then take the Composite output from the VCR or Cable Box and Plug that into the Composite input on your Voodoo Card and then you use the VCR or Cable Box to Tune in the Chanel you want to record.You will be able to see the Video you are captureing on your PC Monitor so you do not need to have it playing on the TV..From what I know of your Card it will Only capture to a max resolution of 352+240 which is Far too low for any sort of Quality ,That is only 25% the Resolution of your TV the the Quality will be Less than 25% of TV Quality...You can get a Capture Card that captures Full resolution Video for Probably $20 on EBay which would Produce much better captures ,You will also need a Lot of Disk Space to capture Quality Video, you should actually have a seperate Drive Just for Video capture....good luck
OK many thanks. Im going to finish building my new computer in the next few months so I think I will buy a cable tuner PCI card and ditch the V3 !
Thats the method i used, only since i dont have a s-vide cable , i had to use a scart to phono lead,, this was my setup: Satelite---->VCR via scart---->VCR TV(SCART)--->capture card(compisit) using software compression, i can do mpg2 real time or even divx real time it works ok, but my capture card can only capture 352*288 (even though its actually capable of 720*576) but i can only capture 720*576 Uncompressed, not ideal . But thats not bad for a £30 capture card!!
I don"t see why you can"t capture at 720+576 ,What is the Problem?? and you don"t have to Capture to Uncompressed For the Highest Quality you Can use the HuffYUV Codec which is a Lossless Codec which achieves up to 4:1 Compression without any Loss of Video Data, Because Captureing at 352+288 is Just going to Produce really Crappy Quality....Cheers
Yes i know about the Huffy YUV codec i have it and have used it even this doesnt allow me to capture full rez, but the problem is part software and part hardware, you see (i have XP) windows direct show (whatis name WMD i cant remember of the top of my head) Basically every catupre application that ive used when you go into the capture cards option it does show all the different frame size options and when, however when i select 720*576 frames sizes (in fact anything over 288) it just doesnt want to capture at this rez, i have tried lowing the pix sample from RGB to YUV2 (in mpeg capture it looks shity, but for divx and .WMV it looks good) to lower the bandwidth, (i'not sure what the speed of my hard drive is, it may be beacause the hard drive can not keep, up but thats silly cause if i able to capture uncompressed that should be possible, also the real time encoding is all CPU not hardware, BUT the *ONLY* way have ever (and beleive me i've tried everying) to capture full rez 720*576 (actually its 704*576) was by using the MFC capture application that was included in the capture cards installtion CD-ROM, this capture software does not allow any form of softwre encodeing its a direct dump of the capture cards A/D signal. Anyway i've contacted the manufacturerer they couldnt help me either, just left me with an email promising too look into it , basically its a low priced £30 card what do you expect? i'm planning on either getting that DVC 100 thingy you mentioned (WWW.SIMPLYDV.CO.UK gave a good review) OR just getting a DVD recorder, i'm just fed up with the hassle of A/D conversions too much headache.. (PS 4:1:1 utilises pix sub sampling to achieve Chroma values, while uncompressed their is no sub sumpling ie 4:4:4 ) but you have a point VHS quality is soo crap whats the point!
