Recording TV with AC-3 audio

[Saiya-Jin]

Hi, I'm planning on buying the Hauppauge WinTV 350 card, and I noticed that it uses MPEG-layer 2 for encoding audio which kinda sucks. Then again I guess no card uses AC-3 or whatever.
Anyway, I was wondering if I could either route the audio to my soundcard (or in this case onboard audio-nforce 2 Soundtorm) and encode it to AC-3 with the Soundstorm APU or with some software or just capture it uncompressed and then later convert it to AC-3?

Btw, can the Soundstorm APU encode any sound to AC-3 or just to output it to an external decoder?

I hope I'm not sounding too unclear.

Thanks for your help.

[Arachnotron]

Forgive my ignorance, but what is the point in using AC3 if analogue TV sound at best is only stereo?

Also, IMHO, if you start encoding the sound separately in software, you loose some of the advantages of hardware mpeg2 encoding.

[Saiya-Jin]

well, ac-3 can be stereo as well, and it's way better then mp2(mpeg1-layer 2). i would still want to have the video being converted to mpeg 2 with the hardware enconder of course, i just don't like mp2 sound and from what i've heard, if i wanted to make a dvd, the american dvd players don't accept mp2 for sound (is that true?)

[Boulder]

I don't think there is a way to get any other audio than MP2, I asked about it at shspvr.com and those people know pretty much everything about the Hauppauge PVR cards. Besides, it's really not that bad as you can go for 384kbps. Just convert that to WAV, process it (noise reduction, normalization etc.) and encode to AC3 if you like.

[Saiya-Jin]

really? and i can't capture it uncompressed either?
oh well, thanks for the reply.

[Wilbert]

Why don't you cap in AVI/uncompressedWAV and encode the audio to AC3 2.0ch?

[Boulder]

Because the card (PVR-350 I assume) doesn't support capturing to AVI, it only does MPEG-2 in hardware.

And no, audio can't be captured in any other format than MP2. Even the mighty GraphEdit won't help:(

[Saiya-Jin]

I see. If I got another capture card, one of those without hardware compression, how about capturing in MJPEG and uncompressed audio? How CPU intensive is it to encode it in real-time. I have an Athlon XP 2400+ oc'd to 2 Ghz 400 FSB, will that cut it? At most I will be capturing at 720x480 for dvd. Or by any chance is there a card that will do MJPEG in hardware?

[Boulder]

I think that a Pinnacle DC10 will do the MJPEG encoding in hardware.

However, it's not that CPU intensive, I used to capture to MJPEG on a 1.4GHz Athlon Thunderbird and Win98SE with a Hauppauge WinTV Theatre without any dropped frames. Audio was captured as uncompressed WAV.

[Saiya-Jin]

Awesome, thanks a lot ;)

Now, which capture card will you recommend for this (with tv tuner)?
I've looked around and found one card from Matrox with hardware mjpeg compression and tv tuner for $89. Is that any good. Should I just get a regular card (no h/w compression) and do it in software?