Recording SKY..?????

[Damien]

Hello all....

I have a Vaio PCG-K215S, and having set our standard VCR to record a TV program last night, my girlfriend suddenly asks me, "Could we connect you're laptop to the Sky box and record programs that way?".....and my reply...."Errrrrrrrr!"...."I'll ask the forum!!"...

So here i am, asking whether it would be possible to connect my laptop and record Sky programs either onto my hard drive or straight to DVD???
I would assume it would probably be better to go to hard drive first, but would this be at all possible?

If any of you think it would be....
a) How would it connect? What type of cable?
b) Would i need some specific software? Is this something that is available?
c) Any idea howe much space it take up? I do have an external hard drive too, giving me 220 Gb of space in total...

Thanks in anticipation...

Damien.

[tellingd]

I assume your laptop doesn't have a TV card. Do you have an analogue-to-digital converter at all? If no then there may be a problem, unless the Sky box puts out a digital signal directly, then it should just be a case of getting a cable with the right connectors at either end.

I'm sure there are some knowledgeable people who can be more specific

[kee-lo_]

Damien,

You would need a piece of hardware like the WinTV USB / Firewire card Haupagge make. It captures from TV and stuff like that.

The space required would be quite big depending on the programs, expect no less than 12GB to be used at any one time.

Writing it on DVD can be done with drag n drop.

HTH

[nick_pan]

yeh and dont expect it to be an easy ride..

though your laptop is powerful enough, your best getting a mid rang 150 pound box to do the linkage between ur sky box and laptop..

newbies often experience, poor video quality, erratic frame rates and worst of all bad audio/video sync problems..
Furthermore, most boxs convert the footage on the fly to MPEG2 format as a form of compression as uncompressed video (AVI) is huge..maximum 1 hour on ur hard disk. MPEG2 is generally good quality if compressed well, tho for best results u'd be getting into video encoding and compression, especially if you only have a standard cd writer and need to encode the footage to MPEG1 to burn on VCDs so u could watch your recorded stuff on your DVD player..

bit more simple if you've got the dvd-writer tho...abit of a hastle.
not worth it, unless uve got an external harddrive and just wanna record footage for archiving

thats why..i myself never really have tried it as i find the old vcr does the job :smileygrin:

[nick_pan]

sorry on reading my post, i may have been abit off putting..

it doesnt have to be that complicated..

just make sure you buy a good box..

www.videohelp.com will answer alot of your questions if your ready to get into it..and it can be quite rewarding.. especially due to the ability to edit your recorded footage tho that will require quite expensive software

[kee-lo_]

Capturing to MPEG 2 is essential if you want good DVD quality for later watching.

Getting an external hard disk is a good idea too.

[nick_pan]

true say,

although never expect it to look the same as the apparent good quality you view on your TV..

pc/laptop monitors are much higher quality and pick out the pixels in high def images..cant really explain but you'll never get footage that looks like what you see on your tv

this is also because u sit alot closer to your laptop than u do ur tv so u notice a pixelated image alot more easier

[kee-lo_]

Yep true.

I think it should be fine to watch the DVD on the TV, then it'll be like it was originally.

[nick_pan]

good point Kee-Lo

recording to your laptop is a great alternative if you plan to have it connected to your tv for later playback.

just a quick note on this, if you do plan to connect it..make sure its configered to project onto a tv screen in the control pannel..

your desktop won't look great on the tv..neither will most stuff, but playing movies in windows media player..ends up looking 90% ok

[kee-lo_]

Reading a text file on the TV isn't good either...