A Challenge

C

cvgd

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 20, 2011
Messages
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This is at the theoretical stage -- it might be a project I pursue over the next year. I'd like to set up a system that allows me to watch and record three cable news channels at the same time: CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. I'd prefer to do it with a single computer. The recordings need to be in a non-drm format, so that they can be edited and otherwise manipulated.

Budget is whatever it takes, preferably under 10K.

I'm just at the very beginning of thinking about this project, but would like to move forward with it in the spring. Any ideas for an approach?
 
What quality do you want to record them at? (480p, 720p, 1080p, etc) and this should be possible for under $1,000
 
If you only want 480p/i, you can do it with basic cable, 3 usb tuners, and a very cheap computer.



Doing some sort of political/media related research project?
 
This isn't even a challenge. This can be done with any budget system today with a cable tuner card. You would only need to spend around $400 on a simple pc, and get a $200 centon cable tuner or hdhomerun prime to record the channels.

You can use Windows 7 Media Center to record in windows .wtv format which can be converted to .dvr-ms. Once in dvr-ms format you can use handbrake to convert it to any format you want.

I pretty much do this with my 3 year old AMD X3 710 with 4 tuners powered by 2x HD HomeRun boxes.
 
To af22's statement - this is completely possible with any cablecard tuner (Ceton, HDHR Prime and Hauppage). However, if the content is marked copy-once, the OP will NOT be able to manipulate the streams as stated in his post. At least, won't be able to w/out jumping through hoops.
 
I do some political organizing, and would like to be able to provide video of media appearances to friends. I rarely have notice of the appearances, so need to be able to go retrieve them after the fact.

There are commercial services that do this, at exorbitant markup (http://www.tveyes.com/). There are some specialized hardware vendors who sell machines that do this for up to ten channels, for roughly $50k.

Given that I'll be doing this for collaborators for free or very minimal cost, I probably won't pursue it until hard drive prices drop back below $50/TB.

1. I would like to record in the highest available resolution, to keep options open (say, someone wants to cut an ad with some footage).

2. How do you display three channels at once in Windows Media Center?

3. I have a HDHomerun Prime 3CC. I'm able to record the cable channels today, but it's DRM protected, I don't believe it's possible to transcode, and I obviously can't play all three channels, live, at once. What do you use to convert your files, af22?

In thinking about this a bit more, I'd like to be able to search the captions and provide transcripts based on the captions. Any suggestions?

I haven't recently explored options for watching and recording HDHR content outside of WMC; something like MythTV or Sage might work better, but I've never used either, and last I checked compatibility was limited.

A system with something like three Hauppage Colossus hooked up to three set top boxes would circumvent the DRM nonsense, but I'm not familiar with the hardware and have never seen the software. Are there capture cards capable of recording multiple streams in HD?
 
I use the HDHR OTA tuners, so I am not familiar with the DRM protected files. I think you may be SOL with a drm file.

For the non-drm wtv files, you can just right click and select convert to dvrms in windows 7.
 
I dont think MythTv and Sage are not cable card compatible because they do not support DRM.
 
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