personal PC PVR experiance (Score 1)

My roommates and I have been PC PVR'ing for about a year. It quite hard to get it setup even for a software guru, but once you do its pretty cool.

One tip I've learned is to get good software. ATI's in the box PVR software is in currently pretty bad shape. It crashs all the time, and generally just sucks.

The best PVR software I've found so far is iuVCR: It's nice because it lets you choose the codecs and it uses the win2k scheduler so it works. It also is very stable.

If you combine that with PICVideos MJPEG codec at setting Q19 then it looks pretty good at 2GB/hr.

And then if you want it small then use VirtualDub to post-process recompress it with DivXNetworks's Divx v5.02 at 600bps to get it down to 0.35GB/hr.

If you like to automate it you can use the scheduler to run a batch file VirtualDub and pass in cmd line args to make it automatically recompress all AVI files from one dir and output them to another. Just run vdub and setup the settings the way you want, and "Save Processing Settings" to a file called settings.vcf (say) then run this at night:

start /wait virutaldub /ssettings.vcf /b"d:\in\","d:\out\" /x /r
move d:\in\*.avi d:\in-done

Good luck