TV Capturing - Any Good Software

Cube623

I've just taken delivery of a Hauppauge HVR-1100 DVB-T PCI Card which i have to say is brilliant. The card delivers fast good tv. I wish i could say the same about the software!!!
WinTV2000 is crap. WinTV32 looks like a program which was made in the Windows 3.1 era . O.k WinTV2000 is a bit better but not much and it really spoils the card as the card is brilliant but the software is dire.

So I'm looking for software to replace WinTV2000 and fast.

The only software i've found is:

Cyberlink PowerCinema 4

This is sooo much nicer, the interface runs v.smoothly and it looks great and sturdy but atm i can only use the analogue side of the TV card (as i don't have an arial cable running from my roof to my pc yet so i cannot pick up digital tv). But the thing that really lets it down is that the picture given from the analogue side of the card is very pixelated. Ok the picture quality anyway is crap as i'm using a v.crappy arial but on WinTV2000 the picture didn't pixelate and it is in PowerCinema 4.

So does anyone know of any better software? Or is there a way of getting rid of the pixelation in PowerCinema 4 as this program is sooooo good except for that!!!

stratcat

Since the capcard is a Hauppauge, it probably uses the bt8xx chip.
Get the WDM driver from the WDM Video Capture Driver
For capture, use VirtualDub (Welcome to virtualdub.org! - virtualdub.org)
For compression, use HuffYUV (Huffyuv)
This combination is the best I've seen as it allows LOTs of fine tuning.
I've run 3 hour captures from cable with preview ON!, at 29.97 fps at 640x480px without a single
dropped frame and <30mS a/v sync errors.

The resulting avi was edited and rendered to dvd mpeg in Vegas and burned to DVD with DVD Architect. DVD looks great!

P4/3.2GHz, 1GB RAM, 200GB SATA disk, XPPro sp2.
ymmv

neezee

i use thing... SnapStream Media Beyond TV best thing out there besides that theres sageTV which ive yet to try but i hear its okay...

gswonsn

I will also have to say that Beyond TV is the best software I have used for recording TV. I have 2 tuners in my case and am able to record 2 shows at the same time without a problem and the results are great. If you are using an NTFS drive you aren't worried by a 4 gig limit on file size. I am converting my vcr collection to digital and record 6 hour tapes as 1 file to edit with VirtualDub. They come out to just over 20 Gig files. Beyond TV handles them beautifully.

Matth

MEDIAPORTAL - free MediaCenter HTPC Software - Home

ProgDVB

Probably the two free ones most worth looking at.