Ok, I took the plunge and bought a new Thomson Tivo from ebay for £120. Quite a good price i think. (he's got 18 left - username "safe2buy1" if anyone is intersted).

Video extraction seems long and complicated, so i was wondering if its possible to get an s-video to firewire lead and capture it in real time through my firewire card? Or is this totally impossible?

Yes there are svideo to firewire capture devices. I have found two they both are about 300 USD. One is from dazzle and I can't remember who makes the other one.

Some of the higher end DV cameras can do it. My JVC when plugged into the expansion module will encode incoming video and send it via Firewire.

It would be much cheaper to buy a normal PCI TV capture card than to get one of the video->Firewire capture devices. If you want an external box then you can buy USB ones. I've got a WinTV PVR USB which works okay. You can tell it's been compressed if you look closely but apart from that it's fine. Don't get the normal WinTV USB however.

No idea what this will do to the quality of the image however. You'll be reencoding the image so it will definately degrade slightly.

- Trevor

Ok, can someone recomend a good video capture card, to take output from the Tivo, TV, video, DVD player etc?

I've got a dell system with 2.4GHz, 512MB RAM, 64 MB Geforce, Soundblaster Live. 1 PCI slot free. Will this give me good video capture results with a good card? I would want at least SVCD quality.

Any of the Hauppauge WinTV cards should be fine.

If you want to offload some of the encoding work from the CPU then get one of the PVR cards. They've all got hardware MPEG2 encoder chips. A normal WinTV card is around £40 but a WinTV PVR card is £150. Depends on if you want to do other things whilst it's encoding really.

- Trevor

Would the software that comes with the card be capable of encoding from svideo, or would I need seperate software? If i need new software, what would you recommend?

Would I notice any difference in av quality with a normal card over a PVR?

Thanks

The hardware would have more to do with it. Most likely, the card will have several inputs. More commonly these consist of composite connections and an Svideo input, and you can choose in the software which to use.

What software will allow editing of my Tivo and TV stuff through the tv card? a friend of mine is going to loan me one.

There shouldn't be any noticeable difference between the PVR version of the PCI WinTV card and the standard PCI one. It's only with the USB one that there is an improvement in quality. All the PVR PCI card gives you is compression of the videostream without needing your CPU.

The card should come with some basic capture software. If you get serious about it then something like Ulead Videostudio would be okay to edit the files.

- Trevor

Just one more thing. The USB PVR has a slight delay between receiving the signal and displaying it on your screen. It's less than 0.5 seconds but it's still noticeable. This is fine if you're watching TV but not so good if you're using it to play games or anything which needs interactivity!

- Trevor

Sometimes my kitchen TV and living room TV will be showing the same program from different sources, e.g. one is showing BBC1 from satellite through the Tivo and the other is tuned directly via terrestrial UHF. I usually notice a difference of about 3 seconds in the audio (the Sat/PVR lags), I know satellite lags terrestrial broadcasts but AFAIK the PVR causes additional delays too. I believe the latter is a side-effect of PVRs in general since they are playing a recording even if it's realtime you're watching and not all of this delay is attributable to the connection.

Nah. I said USB because that's the only WinTV PVR I've got. I don't have the PCI version so I wasn't sure if there was any sort of delay on it. My standard WinTV USB doesn't have any noticeable delay but the picture quality is much worse.

- Trevor