Recording from Sky+ box

bigtimecharlie

I have bought a Dell Laptop Inspirion 6400 and I am now going to try and record/copy the recorded programs from my Sky+ box.
1. What is the best laptop software for recording so that the program can be burned to DVD?

2. Any other tips and trick's that I should be aware of?

watty

Laptop harddrive might be too slow.
IUVCR for video capture. But you can't get decent video capture cards on laptops. only either AV to Firewire Bridge (I use my Sony Camcorder, but you can buy dedicated ones). USB capture cards poor. Some PCMCIA are OK. most poor.

The cheap method is PCI TV tuner card with S-Video.

You need to capture via S-Video or you get PAL artifacts.

TMPEG or various others to encode to MPEG2. MPEG2 capture is poor as that is only single pass, you need two pass for quality. HUFFY, MJPEG or DV format for capture.

Depends on quality you want.
Then you need to author the MPEG2 to DVD,

A DVD recorder is simpler and better quality than any direct capture to DVD format a laptop can do.

L1011

I was recording off TV/composite capture cards to hard drives about 4 times slower than those in laptops in the mid 1990s, watty - he shouldn't have any problems!