Capturing MPEG-2 Streams Losslessly

[FlezZ]

Hello,

I have a SkyStar2 DVB-S capture card in a P3 800MhZ PC. I have been using ProgDVB for watching the DVB-S stream, as it supports some nice plugins.

So, the other day I scheduled ProgDVB to record 3 hours of one channel. Later, when I was watching thorugh the recording, I noticed, that it had some annoying glitches and at one point, it looked like a bunch of frames had been lost.

My question is, how do I avoid all this corruption when capturing to a hdd? For example, would setting ProgDVB to split the stream at some point do any good?

FlezZ

[detox_gr]

try a dvbcore oriented app like DVBdream.i cap to .TS and then demux it to get the streams.works fine

[Schmendrick]

The important point is that when you use a system like yours with just a 800 MHz PIII-Processor if you record with a program like ProgDVB which is decoding the MPEG2-transmission while it is recording the same stream you most likely overload your processor. Also you should record on a separate hard disc which is not the system hard disc (not just only a different partition on the same hard disc but a physically different drive). The reason for this is that is your system already has a heavy load most likely your hard disc cannot move its recording head fast enough between the recording location on its surface and some other location it has to use for windows systems requirements. So if you use a different dis then the discs head can react fast enough.

New PCs with fast prcessors and fast discs usually can buffer the recording data stream properly and does not suffer from these problems.

Schmendrick

[FlezZ]

The important point is that when you use a system like yours with just a 800 MHz PIII-Processor if you record with a program like ProgDVB which is decoding the MPEG2-transmission while it is recording the same stream you most likely overload your processor.
ProgDVB has a nice feature - 'Disable MPEG2 decoder for low CPU use'. I ticked it before I started recording.
I didn't have any heavy programs running on the background. ProgDVB's CPU usage while recording stays within 10-30%.
I have a 160GB Seagate HDD. I wouldn't call it a slow disk. ProgDVB should have been the only application using the disk at the recording time.

[Schmendrick]

I am using the commercial version of DVBstreamexplorer available @: http://www.dvbstreamexplorer.dk/ for DVB-MPEG2 or AVC/H.264-capture. In the latter case recently within a 3 hours capture I only had about 4 dicontinuities, which the Cyberlinks AVC/H.264-decoder included in PowerDVD7 Ultra usually does not has any problems with.