I have a simple solution with a standard DishNetwork receiver and an ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon video card. I run the receiver's S-video output to the ATI's S-video input, and the audio output to my sound card. I can use the ATI's video capture to record MPEG-2 720 X 480 and 48 kHz 16 bit-stereo with 5.1 surround encoding intact at a rate of 8MB/second or 28.8 GB per hour. I have to set the satellite receiver to record at the same time as the ATI Scheduler, so the receiver turns itself on and changes to the proper channel and the hard drive starts filling up with video. Since the receiver gets it's time from the satellite, and Windows XP gets it's time off the internet, they are always synced to within a couple of seconds. To play I use the ATI's S-video output to feed a 32-inch TV, but the quality is good enough that it could be burned to a video CD or a DVD. I now have Windows XP running on a AMD Athlon 1800+ XP with 512 MB RAM, but I ran the same basic setup starting 3 years ago with a Pentium 1 running Win98 with 64MB RAM and an All-In-Wonder 128.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a simple solution with a standard DishNetwork receiver and an ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon video card. I run the receiver's S-video output to the ATI's S-video input, and the audio output to my sound card. I can use the ATI's video capture to record MPEG-2 720 X 480 and 48 kHz 16 bit-stereo with 5.1 surround encoding intact at a rate of 8MB/second or 28.8 GB per hour. I have to set the satellite receiver to record at the same time as the ATI Scheduler, so the receiver turns itself on and changes to the proper channel and the hard drive starts filling up with video. Since the receiver gets it's time from the satellite, and Windows XP gets it's time off the internet, they are always synced to within a couple of seconds. To play I use the ATI's S-video output to feed a 32-inch TV, but the quality is good enough that it could be burned to a video CD or a DVD. I now have Windows XP running on a AMD Athlon 1800+ XP with 512 MB RAM, but I ran the same basic setup starting 3 years ago with a Pentium 1 running Win98 with 64MB RAM and an All-In-Wonder 128.