First of all, I want to apologize since I am certain that this has been discussed here, but I don't even know where to look. There are so many things to read up on. While they're very helpful and informative, I am looking for something basic and simple. Whenever I download HDTV shows, they are around 400 MBs for 1-hour shows (40-42 mins w/o commercials, of course) and so on with exceptional quality, I might add. How is this done EXACTLY? I mean, exactly, what kind of hardware and software to preserve the quality, yet make them really small? Do I have to have Windows XP Media Center? I was looking for a particular show and couldn't find it, so I transferred it from my HD Tivo and converted to an avi. The finished file was still well over 1 GB for a 20 min clip and the quality is not even alose to being as good as regular AVIs that I download. I think this has to be pretty straight forward. I do have a few avi encoders and converters. I just would like to know which one to use and what kind of tuner for PC to get (I am guessing this has to be done on a PC, not a tivo). Once again, I apologize for bring up a redundant topic, but I would really really appreciate any input. Thank you.
I think most of these cappers have a digital TV card - they
capture the native digital stream, no analog conversion.
They can then re-encode that at maximum quality.
What is the resolution of the AVI you speak of? Is it really HD?
It's highly unlikely in full HD(1080i nor 720p) It's clear enough and I can watch them on a portable DVD player and it's looks as good to me as regular DVDs. It has to be clear enough for me to watch it on my computer. I am not sure what the resolutions are. How would I find out? 652 x 352 ? Does that sound like a normal avi resolution? Thanks.
To find the res, right click the avi and choose properties.
Or if that doesn't work, drag it to virtualdub and select file/file information. Or, open it in WMP and choose file/properties.
Of course, it's not HD, but I agree with you, the quality can be surprisingly good.
As I mentioned, they probably started out as full HD on someone's PC
and were then re-encoded. The size/minutes/res, TV epsiode is quite typical. But to get the original file, you need the digital tuner.
A possible alternative is capturing the digital stream out of a
satelite/cable company DVR, but that's a whole other specialty.
In general, the over-the-air digital tuner can capture a better quality, because the signal from the satelite/cable company has already suffered another layer of quite considerable compression.
