How can I go about hooking up my PC to my television or cable line and record programs to my harddrive? I know it must be possible, cause on Torrent sites, people always have TV Shows on there. What do you I need to do, and is there any programs I need to use? Please let me know whatever info you have. Thanks.
You need to have a Video Capture device installed in your PC to Record TV shows to your Hard Drive...The Capture device will generally come with the Software needed to capture the Video to your HD.... You can get a Cheapo TV Card for as Low as $20 but the Cheapo ones do not Produce very good Quality, You will generally have to spend $75 to $100 to get a Decent Capture Card Preferably one that uses Hardware Mpeg-2 Compression Like the "Hauppaggue WinTV PVR-150/250/350" models or the "Tul Theatre 550" which is also a Hardware Mpeg-2 encoder but it uses a 12 bit decoder (Most use a 8 or 10 bit decoder) and it has 16mb of Onboard Ram used as a Frame Buffer so you don"t drop frames and can capture the audio as Dolby Digital AC3 which is the best format if you are going to make DVD"s... http://stores.tomshardware.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=6735559// Cheers
If you have a DV video camera, most of them will allow you to connect your analog input to it (ie the TV) and will output DV, which your computer can capture with a cheap $20 firewire card. Quality should be excellent but it's gonna take up a lot of hard drive space.
