Ok, I've been surfing through the Net for the last couple of weeks pretty intesively, trying to find a solution for capturing DVB-C material _directly_ off the MPEG-TS stream provided by digital TV to my HDD, without re-encoding. So far, I've found two possible products, but their specs are more than vague. One is from Hauppauge and one is from Siemens -- Hauppauge's specs are specially confusing as it seems, based on the specs, that the card would actually re-encode the incoming MPEG-TS stream into MPEG-2, rather than simply unwrapping the MPEG-TS and storing the unwrapped MPEG-1/2 stream to my HDD as it comes in. Siemens' specs are pretty much all in German, which is kinda problematic for me :-)
Does anyone know a solution that would allow capturing DVB-C (or -S / -T) stream _directly_ without any loss in quality, to HDD? And also, if the stream is stored in MPEG-TS stream, are there any methods of demuxing the MPEG-TS to get the actual MPEG-1/2 stream out of it, in order to transfer the data to VCD/SVCD/DVD-R?
Yes, at least Hauppauge DVB-C and Nova-T seem to do that. They capture MPEG-2 transport stream (TS) to PVA, then you can convert it to MPEG-2 program stream for example burning a DVD with PVAStrumento and PVACutter. Subtitles, as in case of YLE TV2 and TV2, can be converted from PVA to SubRip SRT with a program called DS.JAR.
PVA? That's Hauppauge's own container format? And it doesn't do the re-encoding on the fly, but simply just unwraps the MPEG-TS headers and puts it inside PVA wrapper that you can then once again unwrap/Demux down to MPEG-2?
Obviously there are some streams that can't be authored directly to DVD-Video as DVB stream has much more allowed resolutions than DVD-Video AFAIK (some bizarre 512x364 or something like that).
