[plug] TV Ripping

[Mike Holland]

Simon Newton wrote:
 > But then I'd have to have a splitter for antenna cable = more cables.

Some DVB cards have RF pass-through, like on a VCR or STB.


> >>On another note, how much CPU do these babies use when recording two 

> My Athlon 700 can record 2 channels using about 25-30% cpu.

Thats a lot. My olde celeron-333 uses 8%, 1 channel. Is your DMA turned on?

> It's the
> playback the requires a fairly decent machine.

The same old 333MHz PII box can just handle SD playback, and I don't
call that a decent box :-)

 > My 1.4M laptop plays SD
> back fine, but skips when playing HD content.

The current bottom-of-the-range AMD (sempr0n 2600 1.6GHz) will manage
HD playback, and can compress SD to mpeg-4 at at least double realtime.
(I use mplayer/mencoder.)  So its not a big difficulty.

  Slower CPUs should manage with a recent video card, with XvMC support.

Having said that, you might not bother, as there is hardly anything 
worth watching in HD yet, and what there is is a long way from full 
1080i quality.