Cable Forum - View Single Post - Recording from NTL onto laptop hard drive

Neilm · 02-05-2005, 21:03

Thanks for the welcome Guys!

Bossie: as the previous answers said, the Scart to RCA cable is a good idea. You can get them online, or from the likes of Currys, who actually do some very good ones.

The only drawback of this is that using it as a personal video recorder is difficult, as you would need another piece of kit to switch channels on the STB, but at the moment, for you with a laptop, an external tuner is the only answer (even with a PCI card in a desktop PC, you would still have to use the auxilliary inputs for anything other than the basic "passthrough" channels; and the quality of NTL's passthrough leaves a lot to be desired in many areas)

MPEG2 is hard on the HDD- though you can generally select the quality in software. The default quality for Hauppauge tuners is about 3Gb per hour of recording. If you are good about archiving to DVD, then it may not be a problem, but shows do tend to accumulate! You can also use software to transcode the MGEG2 video to WMV, which cuts the file size by about two thirds.

02-05-2005, 21:03	#7
Neilm Inactive Join Date: May 2005 Location: Harlow, Essex Age: 70 Services: NTL Digital STB x3 NTL 2mb BB Posts: 8	Re: Recording from NTL onto laptop hard drive Thanks for the welcome Guys! Bossie: as the previous answers said, the Scart to RCA cable is a good idea. You can get them online, or from the likes of Currys, who actually do some very good ones. The only drawback of this is that using it as a personal video recorder is difficult, as you would need another piece of kit to switch channels on the STB, but at the moment, for you with a laptop, an external tuner is the only answer (even with a PCI card in a desktop PC, you would still have to use the auxilliary inputs for anything other than the basic "passthrough" channels; and the quality of NTL's passthrough leaves a lot to be desired in many areas) MPEG2 is hard on the HDD- though you can generally select the quality in software. The default quality for Hauppauge tuners is about 3Gb per hour of recording. If you are good about archiving to DVD, then it may not be a problem, but shows do tend to accumulate! You can also use software to transcode the MGEG2 video to WMV, which cuts the file size by about two thirds.