Further TV rips may wait

[terry666]

I am not entirely happy with the size of the files I'm putting out, for the quality I want to achieve. Though I'm using a digital video recorder, it's connected via S-Video, and there's only so much you can do with analogue video. (S-Video has a resolution of 480i or 576i, and my DVR captures at 720i - no room for improvement there...)

I have recently acquired an HD Satellite receiver with a DVI output. I've connected this directly to my LCD monitor, and the quality improvement is really noticed. HD channels are of course incredible, but even the regular channels cleaner, crisper, and as far as I can tell, NOT interlaced. (Probably 720p.) Broadcast channels don't look too much better, but the specialty channels where I rip my TV shows sure do.

My theory is, that without interlacing to contend with, AutoGK will be able to make much better AVIs. The file sizes may not change, but they'll contain more definition.

So I bought myself a Christmas present this year, and ordered an HDMI/DVI capture card. This card captures the digital information sent to it (ie the MPEG-2 signal) via the DVI output, and writes it to the hard drive. Unlike analogue capture cards, there is no on-the-fly encoding. My card will give me true digital rips of whatever my sat box is putting out. The only quality loss you will see is when I encode the file with AutoGK.

So until I'm setup, I plan on only capturing movies that may not play again for a while. While the TV shows I'm posting are new to many FLM members, they're quite common over here. I'm in no impending danger of missing anything.

Thanks for you comments!