HDTV DVR on your PC, no cable box required
As the learned scholar Matt Burns pointed out,
you may have unencrypted HDTV programming flowing through your cable
lines even as we speak. Wild man Tony Musico decided to record HDBeat readers favorite program, Lost (Dude, that guy Desmond WTF?) with nothing more than his bare hands and a ukulele. A Pentium 4 PC and HDTV FusionHDTV5 Lite capture card
also played a small, rather insignificant, role. For those of you
with HDTV's and no cable box, or maybe those who haven't made the jump
yet and just have a PC this is a very viable option. Well, viable if you have 8 GB's of hard drive space to store an hour of HDTV programming and 3.5 hours to convert it to DVD format, but still, you can't beat the price.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
ken52787 @ Sep 22nd 2005 6:14PM
I have an old FusionHDTV 3 card and I swear by HDTV on the PC.
The 8GB per hour is kind of misleading tho, that's assuming the stream is always maxed out at 19Mbps, which is rarely is. 1080i are sometimes up near the 8GB mark, but are typically more like 6-7, and 720p shows rarely get above 5GB for me. Still quite a bit, but not that bad considering the deals they have on hard drives these days.
James Stevenson @ Sep 22nd 2005 8:04PM
I don't believe any cable companies are technically allowed to encrypt the local HD stuff.
When will we get a capture card with a cable card slot though?
Martin @ Sep 23rd 2005 5:59PM
This doesn't seem interesting to me until I can get HBO HD on my PC.