Capturing analog TV with Canopus ADVC-100 or Pinnacle Moviebox DV?

[crackpot_religion]

Since DV converters like ADVC-100 or Moviebox DV only have Composite-and S-Video input connectors, what is the easiest way to capture analog TV/cable TV (with coaxial connector) to my PC using these devices?

I could connect the coaxial to my TV and receive its composite+audio output, but my PC will be away from the TV set.

Would a cheap TV tuner card do?

[jggimi]

Hello, and welcome to Doom9's forum! I hope you'll find it useful.

If you are absolutely committed to an RF (antenna) connection -- I recommend using an external tuner rather than an internal one, due to common complaints about PCI bus or Motherboard chipset interference.

VCRs make for handy RF -> Composite converters -- I even have one that will do RF -> S-video.

If the coaxial cable you plan to run contains cable signals, perhaps a second cable box would be just what you need, if you can acquire a cable box with composite or S-video out, and assuming digital cable.

Understand that there are effectively 4 grades of analog video signal connections. In descending quality, they are component, S-video, composite/SCART, and at the bottom, RF.

[crackpot_religion]

Thanks for the hospitality, jggimi, and for the info on different analog signal grades. I do know about the basic difference between component/S-Video/composite. Unfortunately my cable provider is analog (they only run coaxial to houses).

[crackpot_religion]

Another question. Does capturing and mpeg1/2/4-encoding (real-time) using:

external tuner -> Canopus/Pinnacle (realtime mpeg encoding) -> mpeg files on HDD

has any advantages over the usual, more direct way:

external tuner (realtime mpeg encoding) -> mpeg files on HDD

Reading the datasheet for Canopus or Pinnacle, they don't seem to have an MPEG encoder chip so MPEG encoding will still be done by software, am I right? Then it will be prone to framedrops too when I am using my PC heavily during capturing/encoding, right?

I want to make low-to-medium mpeg/divx files (bitrates around 600k-1200k) from TV shows. Quality is not very important, I just want reasonably small files. But I am more concerned with dropped frames. My PC is not superfast (one is P4 1.4Ghz and the other is XP 1700+) and I do run lots of apps while working (including running Linux under VMWare as a fileserver :-) ).