[Cialug] OT direct tv

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 11:00 PM, Dan Hockey <icepuck2k at mchsi.com> wrote:
> I've been experimenting with xp-mce and my analog/digital tuner, a 30min
>  show takes up ~1gb space in the msdvr format, which is foreign to movie
>  maker. Dish network keeps raising their rates is why I've been looking into
>  direct tv dvr. I could guess I could keep my vhs/dvd burner for now.

If you're considering using a PC DVR check out Beyond TV from
snapstream. It is as easy to use as XP's MCE and has many of the
advantages of MythTV (multiple recording formats (though use the one
optimized for your tuner card if applicable), lots of extra plugins
and features). I have a PVR150 tuner which has the mpeg2 encoder built
in. When using mythtv, which used the format native to the card, the
files were much smaller than when I used mce. And mce re-encodes them
into a format with drm so you can't easily do anything fun with them.
Beyond TV gives the choice of the native mpeg2 or mpeg4 or wmv9 (maybe
others too) so you can burn them to DVD or include a clip in a
presentation.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode