Problem: I want to record tons of telly and stuff from a sky digibox, onto something that will let me archive it all on my server.
1. If I get a dvd recorder, that would be fine, but I would have to rip any disks it burns before I can put them on the server. Some stuff would be like nascar races which are 4 1/2 hours long each, so I`m not sure how that would work from being on the hard drive in a dvd recorder to being on a disk to rip as the files would be way over 4gb at decent quality.
2. If I get sky plus, that would also be fine, but I can`t move the videos it records onto a pc as they are uberly encrypted and it has no connection ports that a pc could use.
So my main idea at the moment is to build a dedicated pc setup like a proper media center.
The machine I`ve picked is an HP D530, which takes good speed HT P4`s, can hold up to 4gb pc3200 ram (I`m thinking about 2gb will be comfortable), has gigabit lan, usb2.0, and can take 2 pci cards, and a low profile agp card (probably a gf 5200FX with a low profile bracket). Its also an sff in the branded pc sense, so its small in a video recorder rather than shuttle kind of way and will thus fit in my tv cabinet. One pci slot will possibly be a wireless card to connect to my network, and the other will be the capture card.
The card I`m looking at is the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500MCE, because it has dual tuners and a lot of the racing I would want to record is only shown twice on sky, and there are literally about 10 events I would want to record per weekend, so many of them clash.
Now. From what I`m aware if you record something in Windows MCE, it uses a codec called DVR-MS which is basically mpeg2 with some kind of id tag and drm, and is saved as some kind of wmv. The drm for now I`ll have to live with as I`m not sure how much of the stuff I would want to record would have the protection enabled (I won`t be whoring films or big tv series or anything - it`ll be 90% motorsports and stuff like on discovery).
The main problem is that I`m not sure how its going to work with my sky digibox. Has anyone tried this, or does any know if I`m going to run into any problems?
1. If I get a dvd recorder, that would be fine, but I would have to rip any disks it burns before I can put them on the server. Some stuff would be like nascar races which are 4 1/2 hours long each, so I`m not sure how that would work from being on the hard drive in a dvd recorder to being on a disk to rip as the files would be way over 4gb at decent quality.
2. If I get sky plus, that would also be fine, but I can`t move the videos it records onto a pc as they are uberly encrypted and it has no connection ports that a pc could use.
So my main idea at the moment is to build a dedicated pc setup like a proper media center.
The machine I`ve picked is an HP D530, which takes good speed HT P4`s, can hold up to 4gb pc3200 ram (I`m thinking about 2gb will be comfortable), has gigabit lan, usb2.0, and can take 2 pci cards, and a low profile agp card (probably a gf 5200FX with a low profile bracket). Its also an sff in the branded pc sense, so its small in a video recorder rather than shuttle kind of way and will thus fit in my tv cabinet. One pci slot will possibly be a wireless card to connect to my network, and the other will be the capture card.
The card I`m looking at is the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500MCE, because it has dual tuners and a lot of the racing I would want to record is only shown twice on sky, and there are literally about 10 events I would want to record per weekend, so many of them clash.
Now. From what I`m aware if you record something in Windows MCE, it uses a codec called DVR-MS which is basically mpeg2 with some kind of id tag and drm, and is saved as some kind of wmv. The drm for now I`ll have to live with as I`m not sure how much of the stuff I would want to record would have the protection enabled (I won`t be whoring films or big tv series or anything - it`ll be 90% motorsports and stuff like on discovery).
The main problem is that I`m not sure how its going to work with my sky digibox. Has anyone tried this, or does any know if I`m going to run into any problems?