Advice for recording HD TV material
 

need advice as how to go about recording HD TV stuff.

1) what's the cheapest, but good, HD recording device?

2) is there a HD recording device that will allow me to transfer the show to my pc, say via usb connections? don't want to waste time & energy playing back the show and burning to a dvd and then transfer to my pc.

3) what's the best / easiest method of authoring dvds from these HD sources? will i have to re-encode the HD recordings to DVD level? what's the best app to do this?

remember, i'm in UK so all hrdware advice needs to take that into account.

thanks.

If you use a dvd recorder you get the whole picture but will have those widescreen black bars. There are some dvd players that can upscale widescreen content to 1080p which also fills the whole hdtv screen and no black bars. That being said, the picture is not as great as watching it live on your hdtv.

Some people find ways to connect their tivo/dvr to their computers and take shows off the hard drive. There are also some blu-ray players that have hard drives. You can connect these to your computer and burn content to a blu-ray disc using a blu-ray burner. Blu-ray uses a different format and I don't know if you can convert AVCHD to mpeg/dvd.

They also have blu-ray recorders now that record 1080p tv directly to a blu-ray disc with perfect quality. Right now they are super expensive.

d17 - ta for that. something for me to think about.

what about dvb-s2 cards for the pc?
are they any good?

Im sorry but half of this is incorrect information

It is not the dvd recorder it is the Sources Output (Cablebox (Cox, Warner, Comcast), Sat Box (DirecTV, Dish Network, Etc)

DirecTV boxes HD Boxes HR20,HR21, HR22 output through S-video at the correct aspect ratio. They do not auto letterbox through the analog output. So whatever HD show you record from it direct to dvd will not be letterboxed (Black bars on top and bottom)

Cox Cable & Comcast make it auto letterbox through through S-video so the dvd recorder records it with the black bars.

But in the UK i have no idea if there is a lock on the cable boxes through Analog outputs.


To answer the first post it really depends on your end goal.

If your end goal is dvd then record straight to dvd would be the quickest way. but get a good dvd recorder which i would say the philips DVDR3575H/37 is the best one but this is ntsc not pal so i have no idea for you.

If your cable box locks the output of svideo then get a bluray recorder or just transfer the streams through firewire to your computer.

i know a lot of people that live in the uk rip the streams directly from channels. you will get .ts format usually.

It is a pain in the butt converting some of these files to dvd (Mpeg2) and not coming out ugly.

If you are going to have them on bluray in the end then get a bluray recorder. the hardest part will be removing the commercials without re encoding or coming out ugly.

go to avsforum and ask this question i bet you will get some good answers

konfusion - thanks. more for me to think about.

i am tempted to start recording & authoring shows in hi-def format.
but costs are high at the moment.
tho i could save money by backing up the authored stuff onto hdds.

is hi def trading taking off yet?

I never knew that Konfusion thanks.

i wish i could afford a bluray recorder so many shows i wish i could put on bluray instead but find trades might be a huge problem.

plus authoring might be a problem too.