How to record tv on my PC?
December 2, 2005 2:58 AM Subscribe
There's a ton of tv recording/viewing software out there for the computer, but which is the best and the cheapest?
I currently have InterVideo Home Theater installed on my Win XP computer. I have a tv card and a cable connection in my office, so I can record television to my hard disk. Unfortunately, Home Theater seems to be lacking in functionality. I can't rename or sort tv channels. I briefly installed PowerCinema, but I didn't get any sound on that.
Scheduling a recording with Intervideo is easy, but the software seems to be confused about the meaning of "one time recording" vs "every day", and has trouble to distinguish "record one hour" from "keep recording until my harddisk is bursting". Also, it's bloated: there's a lot of features I don't need and actively hate (music player, photo album viewer, etc. etc.)
So I was wondering if there's any simple, effective, cheap (free, if possible) tv watching/recording software for the PC. Answers like: 'get a TiVo'/'buy this or that hardware' are not useful, I'm a non-USian. Thanks.
I currently have InterVideo Home Theater installed on my Win XP computer. I have a tv card and a cable connection in my office, so I can record television to my hard disk. Unfortunately, Home Theater seems to be lacking in functionality. I can't rename or sort tv channels. I briefly installed PowerCinema, but I didn't get any sound on that.
Scheduling a recording with Intervideo is easy, but the software seems to be confused about the meaning of "one time recording" vs "every day", and has trouble to distinguish "record one hour" from "keep recording until my harddisk is bursting". Also, it's bloated: there's a lot of features I don't need and actively hate (music player, photo album viewer, etc. etc.)
So I was wondering if there's any simple, effective, cheap (free, if possible) tv watching/recording software for the PC. Answers like: 'get a TiVo'/'buy this or that hardware' are not useful, I'm a non-USian. Thanks.
ATV2000 is free, so at least you can try it without feeling bad if it sucks for you.
MythTV always *sounds* great, but after 5 installations of it for various cards and never once having audio and video work in sync, I gave up on it. Oh well... I even have a PVR150 card to show for it.
posted by shepd at 4:58 AM on December 2, 2005
MythTV always *sounds* great, but after 5 installations of it for various cards and never once having audio and video work in sync, I gave up on it. Oh well... I even have a PVR150 card to show for it.
posted by shepd at 4:58 AM on December 2, 2005
Knoppmyth, for MythTV. It works, but so do you, getting it configured. Once you're set, it's good. Biggest trouble is it's fussy about your TV card.
Mine is running on an 'old' 1.2GHtz AMD. We can view and record at the same time without problems. It may be compressing too, but the software handles that in background. Oh, you can also view something while you record the same thing, and pause/rewind live TV. We never bother with that. In fact, we recorded so much stuff we canceled our satellite subscription 2 months ago, and we're not even close to running out of stuff. We would have kept recording but the drive got full.
posted by Goofyy at 5:50 AM on December 2, 2005
Mine is running on an 'old' 1.2GHtz AMD. We can view and record at the same time without problems. It may be compressing too, but the software handles that in background. Oh, you can also view something while you record the same thing, and pause/rewind live TV. We never bother with that. In fact, we recorded so much stuff we canceled our satellite subscription 2 months ago, and we're not even close to running out of stuff. We would have kept recording but the drive got full.
posted by Goofyy at 5:50 AM on December 2, 2005
Response by poster: Ok, let me add that I don't have the heart/time to install Linux, so please stick to WinXP solutions.
posted by NekulturnY at 5:59 AM on December 2, 2005
posted by NekulturnY at 5:59 AM on December 2, 2005
There have been a couple of things that I have tried, but eventually fell back to using XP Media Center Edition, which doesn't seem to be an option in your case:
Meedio (free & paid versions) looks nice, but it is fairly slow to start up, and is written in .Net
GB-PVR (free) is a home grown solution which I tried only for a short time, also written in .Net
both of these products have plug-in capability, so anything that is not included in the core may have been extended in a plug-in. It has been a while since I looked into plug-ins, but at the time both had quite a few available (quality unknown).
With Meedio, I had some problems using my remote, but it may have been an XP Media Center Edition issue where it did not want to relinquish the control of the remote.
posted by Mahogne at 6:28 AM on December 2, 2005
Meedio (free & paid versions) looks nice, but it is fairly slow to start up, and is written in .Net
GB-PVR (free) is a home grown solution which I tried only for a short time, also written in .Net
both of these products have plug-in capability, so anything that is not included in the core may have been extended in a plug-in. It has been a while since I looked into plug-ins, but at the time both had quite a few available (quality unknown).
With Meedio, I had some problems using my remote, but it may have been an XP Media Center Edition issue where it did not want to relinquish the control of the remote.
posted by Mahogne at 6:28 AM on December 2, 2005
Response by poster: I'll upgrade the specs: I tried GB-PVR (looks like a great piece of software) and ATV2000. ATV didn't really do it for me (bad quality, lousy interface). GB-PVR didn't know my TV tuner card (it's ASUS). So please: Asus and WinXP compatible software.
posted by NekulturnY at 7:03 AM on December 2, 2005
posted by NekulturnY at 7:03 AM on December 2, 2005
Best answer: It ain't free, but I run SageTV at home and love it. There's also the anti-free offering from BeyondTV, also rumored to be a good product. Each of these allow your computer to work much like a Tivo.
For what it's worth, I have one old computer at home: Athlon 800MHz, 768MB RAM, and a nVidia 5200 based card with 128 MB RAM on it. I can record, watch and have my wife typing a Christmas wish list all at the same time. I'm running a Hauppauge PVR-150 mind you. It does all the hard work of encoding the stream. Also, I have the captured video on a different disk than the OS.
posted by kc0dxh at 7:09 AM on December 2, 2005
For what it's worth, I have one old computer at home: Athlon 800MHz, 768MB RAM, and a nVidia 5200 based card with 128 MB RAM on it. I can record, watch and have my wife typing a Christmas wish list all at the same time. I'm running a Hauppauge PVR-150 mind you. It does all the hard work of encoding the stream. Also, I have the captured video on a different disk than the OS.
posted by kc0dxh at 7:09 AM on December 2, 2005
Response by poster: Update: Meedio won't work either.
posted by NekulturnY at 7:47 AM on December 2, 2005
posted by NekulturnY at 7:47 AM on December 2, 2005
Best answer: Another vote in general for SageTV: I have been using it as a TIVO-replacement for more than 2 years...
Except that it probably won't work with your capture card.
Sage really works best with hardware MPEG2/MPEG4 encoding capture cards (such as Hauppauge PVR-150/250), and your ASUS card is most likely a 'software' capture card that leaves all the encoding to your CPU (which requires a lot of CPU horsepower and system speed to avoid frames being dropped). Hardware capture cards also give the best image quality for the disk space used...
Other solutions that work with 'software' capture cards:
BeyondTV may work better for you -- check to see if your capture card is supported.
Showshifter (pay)
Got all Media (free/donationware)
posted by nielm at 7:52 AM on December 2, 2005
Except that it probably won't work with your capture card.
Sage really works best with hardware MPEG2/MPEG4 encoding capture cards (such as Hauppauge PVR-150/250), and your ASUS card is most likely a 'software' capture card that leaves all the encoding to your CPU (which requires a lot of CPU horsepower and system speed to avoid frames being dropped). Hardware capture cards also give the best image quality for the disk space used...
Other solutions that work with 'software' capture cards:
BeyondTV may work better for you -- check to see if your capture card is supported.
Showshifter (pay)
Got all Media (free/donationware)
posted by nielm at 7:52 AM on December 2, 2005
A third vote for Sage.TV. I set forth to build a MythTV, and when it just got too geeky (and that's saying a lot), I went to SageTV and haven't looked back.
The entire saga is documented on my blog here.
Linux is great, but not on my DVR.
posted by SlyBevel at 8:56 PM on December 2, 2005
The entire saga is documented on my blog here.
Linux is great, but not on my DVR.
posted by SlyBevel at 8:56 PM on December 2, 2005
Response by poster: UPDATE
I used ShowShifter's free trial, which worked fine. I tried to buy it but the code they provided didn't work. I e-mailed them numerous times, but never got an answer (let alone a working code). I finally had to file a complaint with my cc company to get a refund. Avoid.
I then moved to BeyondTV which isn't free but has been serving me well the last two months. It misses some features: you can't rearrange or rename your channels as you please. It scans your cable (or satellite or antenna) for channels, assigns them a number and that's it. Also, it's not compatible with any EPG's outside the US. But it works flawlessly and doesn't seem to eat too much CPU. Recommended. Thanks for all the suggestions.
posted by NekulturnY at 9:34 AM on March 2, 2006
I used ShowShifter's free trial, which worked fine. I tried to buy it but the code they provided didn't work. I e-mailed them numerous times, but never got an answer (let alone a working code). I finally had to file a complaint with my cc company to get a refund. Avoid.
I then moved to BeyondTV which isn't free but has been serving me well the last two months. It misses some features: you can't rearrange or rename your channels as you please. It scans your cable (or satellite or antenna) for channels, assigns them a number and that's it. Also, it's not compatible with any EPG's outside the US. But it works flawlessly and doesn't seem to eat too much CPU. Recommended. Thanks for all the suggestions.
posted by NekulturnY at 9:34 AM on March 2, 2006
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by antifuse at 4:20 AM on December 2, 2005