Is it possible to capture using the AVC codec through Media Center?

[unrealism]

okay so I am pretty impressed with the quality of Nero AVC. But is it possible to capture shows using the AVC codec through media center? I think it can be done with with the nero media center suite, but wanted it to work with WMCE.

Thanks again

[morph166955]

Heres how I'll answer this, if your media center is powerful enough to do real time h.264 encoding @ what ever resolution you want it to work at, then maybe (I'm not honestly sure since I've never tried it, but im leaning towards no from past MCE experience). Otherwise, even if MCE could (which I doubt), you wouldn't be able to encode it fast enough for it to work properly and given MCE's temperamental state at times I doubt it would work for very long if it could. MCE is designed to take what ever stream you have coming in (lets for argument say your watching over the air tv through a tv card), encode that stream (if your tv card isnt already), store it (temporarily or permanently), decode it, and play it back all with in 2 seconds of receiving the image. Its kinda cool to see if you put a regular tv and an mce next to each other that the mce is almost exactly 2 seconds behind the regular tv for just this reason.

Chances are, your media center isnt powerful enough to do the encoding that fast since I know from experience that my dual x5355 quadcore xeons can barely hit 1080p in realtime and thats if im a little flexible with the settings in x264. My suggestion to you if your really looking to do that, is to tweak the media center to encode as it is now at a crazy high bitrate and then re-encode that to h.264.

Your other option which I'm not sure if this is what your considering, is to invest in a hd tv tuner. If your looking to just do over the air recordings you can simply record the already encoded h.264 ts that they are broadcasting and then just remux it later on. see the HDTV section on here for more info on that. I have one from DVICO and it works pretty well although the over the air broadcast is a bit limited and aligning an antenna can be a pain some times.

Hope that was at least a little helpful.

[unrealism]

yea it was a little helpful, I was thinking of investing in a capture card to do tv recording again, but the last time I did it I was not all that crazy with the quality. But that was a long time ago and certainly things have changed a bit. I might go ahead and give it a try anyway just to see what it cranks out. Thanks for the input. :)