Is there an easier way to get TV recordings to a hard drive?

I bought one of those in 2012. It didn't seem to like media centre on my old HP laptop as it would crash occasionally.

The August T210 stick I've used since January has been faultless with Next PVR. The PCTV 292e would crash on a semi-regular basis.

Sounds like a Windows driver issue. My T210, 292e and 290e all work fine in Linux for long periods of time.

I don't suppose there are any ways of *ahem* archiving recordings from a YouView box ... ?

(I think I might already know the answer to this!)

Nope. Tried to look for information on how to do this, but to no avail.

I have a similar question to that of the OP, so I'm hoping someone can provide advice.

I currently capture/edit my TV clips for use on TVF (or just to save) by using Pinnacle Studio 11, which is linked to the S-video & L-R Audio ports on my Sky+HD DRX890 using a Dazzle DVC100 'virtual capture card' connected to a USB 2.0 port on my PC.

This has lasted me well for years, but the quality of my clips isn't as good as those of others. As you 'nasty lot' have commented, I can often end up with PAL artefacts on still screen grabs and generally SD grade recordings from HD programmes.

I'm thinking of upgrading to Pinnacle Studio 19, as I'm hoping it's similar to v11 and easy to use for an amateur. However, when I look to upgrade the Dazzle link, the best option is a Dazzle Video Creator Platinum HD, but am I going to get HD quality from the same S-Video etc connections to my Sky STB?

I would appreciate some advice on the best solution for getting HD captures from my Sky STB to the PC (and into Pinnacle Studio) with as little loss of quality as possible. Am I on a hiding to nothing with my current (or intended setup)?

The Sky Engineer very kindly gave me a spare third feed from the dish (for the small gift of a cuppa and some biscuits ), and I could always buy a card to allow this to directly connect to the PC: but then I presumably wouldn't be able to record anything other than FTA channels, as I wouldn't be getting the signal through the VideoGuard decrypter in the STB.

What solutions do others use?

Apologies for the very long post.

S-video connections will only every deliver SD captures as the S-video signal in Europe will only ever be 576/50i (for US audiences it will be 480/59.94i), and even if you go for an S-video grab solution you'll still end up with grabs only a little better than PAL composite ( the benefit of S-video is that you don't get interference between chroma and luma - i.e. coloured fuzziness on black and white stripes etc.)

A lot of us capture using PC DVB tuners (not Sky boxes) and grab as screen shots when playing back the 1080i off-air recordings in VLC.

There are ways of capturing HDMI on a PC - but Sky boxes have HDCP encryption to prevent copying and HDMI Capture solutions usually won't work with these. There are some ways round this - but they probably can't be discussed here.

I sometimes use a generic DVB T2 USB stick but I could never find any reliable software to just record the streams with - I find it easier to work with a generic no brand DVB-T2 STB, about 15 quid, which records the raw output onto a USB drive which lets me do what I want with.

Re WTV, When I used to use the 'MC-TV converter' for WTV videos, I had to edit my own script into it so I would get the untouched MPEG2 video, all the built in options either deinterlaced it, etc. They might have updated it though since then though.

On a related note- is there any (ideally Mac) software that will do for HD24 TS files what MPEG Streamclip does for MPEG2 TS files? (ie edit without re-encoding)

MC-TV Converter hasn't been updated since 2011.

Some of the TMPGEnc software would let you do that with MPEG2 stuff(though tied to GOP-boundaries) - I used to do it to tidy up DVD recordings without re-encoding.

I'd quite like to find some Mac, PC or Linux software that allowed transport stream editing (though it's tricky to do in a compliant way I think)

TV Headend in Linux (working on a Raspberry Pi or similar) isn't a bad solution - you get the Freeview and Freeview HD EPG, can schedule recordings etc.

I have a paid-for copy of DVB Viewer which is also very useful in Windows.



I've used ffmpeg with .wtv files for ages now. It supports audio and video streams well - though subtitles are a bit of an issue.