On 1/5/17 8:55 AM, Terry Coombs wrote:
Jon Danniken wrote:
On 1/5/17 7:27 AM, Terry Coombs wrote:
OK , I'm cheap and don't want to pay Directv an additional monthly
fee for them to supply a DVR so my wife can see the shows she misses
the nights she has to work . I already have a PC hooked up to the TV
and use it to play stored content , so that part is covered . What I
want is a PCI card that I can use to record a couple of the series
she likes for later playback . There's a whole bunch of stuff out
there , from just a few bucks to hundreds ... I'm not looking for
the absolute lowest price , just a functional device to capture some
video . It needs to run under WinXP Pro , though if I have to I can
install Vista (but I'd rather not) on that comp for the Media Center
program . Any suggestions for a brand or a particular model ? I'd
prefer to stay below 50 bucks ...

It depends on how you intend to interface with the device. I used to
use a Hauppauge WinTV PCI card way back when with analog cable,
connected with coax cable. You can still buy these for cheap on ebay,
used, from $5 to $10 (you can spend more if you want a new one, of
course).
One thing to consider is the age of the computer, processor type, HDD
space, and RAM available, as compressing/storing video can be taxing
on ancient systems.

Jon

I'll be hooking this unit to either the RF output of the satellite box with
a coax cable (from a splitter) or the component video output . The computer
is an HP a1600n , dual core 2.3Ghz AMD Athlon and I have IIRC 2Gb RAM - more
RAM is available if needed . There is a 250Gb hdd with the OS partition and
a storage partition plus a 1Tb hdd that is way less than full for media
storage .

That sounds like it would be decent enough for one of the cards like I
had, depending on what kind of file size and resolution you want to
compress the resulting video into. In any case it wouldn't hurt to try
a used one from ebay. The one I have has both an RF input as well as a
composite input (single yellow) for input (maybe the newer ones have
component input if you want higher quality video).

I haven't followed them for awhile, so it is also possible that a more
expensive model might have its own ability to do video compression on
the card, but then it would also have to be XP compatible.

Jon