Anyone use Sony Giga Pocket PVR (1 Viewer)

[Bob McElfresh]

I'm in the market for a new CPU and came across this kind of neat unit computer & PVR unit:

Sony VAIO Digital Studio RG34G

It features something called "Giga Pocket" PVR which simply looks like a PC Tuner/Capture card. (Creative has one for $99).

But it also has audio/composite/svideo inputs which they say you can use to archive your videos onto the DVD burner.

Does anyone have experience with this? And the big question: Can you record shows onto the hard drive, then burn them into DVD's?

 

[Robert_J]

Can you record shows onto the hard drive, then burn them into DVD's?

Yes you can.

-Robert

 

[Todd Hochard]

Hmmm... can I get a solid 30 frame/sec capture at 640x480 with that $28 card on a PIII machine?

 

[Ken Chan]

I've never used that card, but I've gotten solid full-frame captures on a Pentium-166; the processor is only one variable. If the card does hardware compression -- and that WinFast sounds like it does MPEG -- then all you need is a reasonably fast hard drive. The card will encode frames in real-time, without any real burden on the CPU, so the only question is whether the frames can be written to the drive in real-time. Obviously, the smaller the frame, or the better the compression, the less data there is. But even DVD-quality MPEG-2 (10 Mbps) should have no problem with any recent drives.

So I'd guess it would work. The only caveat is that MPEG is not really a format designed for editing, and any recompression will reduce the quality, although maybe not enough so you'd notice or care.

//Ken