digital cable better then regular cable?

[dvd_maniac]

Is digital cable a better source to capture from then regular cable? Even if I am capturing non-digital channel? Is the resolution different? I captured a file over my friends house with my own computer and he has satellite tv (DSS) and the resulting file looks much better then when i capture at my house with regular cable. Will I get a better quality if I go to digital cable?

[MikeS]

I'm wondering also. My neighborhood is going to be upgraded to digital cable so I'm wondering if it would be worth buying it.

[Awatef]

It depends on the bitrate and the resolution used by the TV station:
Analog stations have always constant quality, the resolution is estimated at 352x576 and the picture is always artifact free, all what you need is a little bit filtering to get rid of the noise and all will be nice.
Digital stations have variable quality: the one will use a resolution of 352x576 with a bitrate of 5000kbps => perfect quality - no aritfacts at all; the other will use 704x576 and a bitrate of 4000kbps => good to poor quality, depending on what is being aired, with a lot of macroblocks within scenes with a lot of movement (action series or movies, animes, football, etc)

NB: replace the 576 with 480 if you're living in a NTSC country

[Darksoul71]

From my experience analogue satellite still provides best quality for capturing:
-Nearly no noise (depending on receiver, connection to capture card, quality of LNB, etc)
-No compression artefacts like digital cable or satellite. For satellite this is even more true than for cable. Companies pay a lot $$ for transpoder bandwidth. So what do you think a company will do ?
Sending 1 channel on a transpoder band they rented with maximum bitrate or 3 to 4 channels with reduced bitrate ?

If your cable signal is worse then try playing around with denoise filters before encoding (this works best with best AVI material captured in full res with MJPEG or Huffyuv).

I wouldn´t pay a dime for a digital sat receiver unless all channels I need send at a decent bitrate.

-D$

[EricBall]

Some other items to consider:

1. Can you get access to the digital bitstream directly? Although this may require hacking the decoder. But the concept is similar to those people hacking Tivos.

2. Does the decoder provide an S-Video or component output? Of course, that depends on whether the source material was in composite or component format.

I am partial to analog cable, but that might have something to do with having 2 TVs and 2 VCRs which all get used simultaneously to "watch" different shows. I would also be concerned about frequency aliasing if your capture sampling rate is different than the decoder's.