Hello!

First: there's no financial link between the developers of the program and myself, so I hope you people don't think I'm spamming

Second: some of you might already know about it, but I didn't find anything in the search, so I thought I'll post a thread on it.

Now what is this all about?

showshifter!
This program just rocks
I tested it this weekend and I was able to capture live TV directly to DivX5 with mp3 sound; no framedrops. There are various recording profiles and if your pc isn't fast enough to compress it all live (or if you want 2-pass encoding), you can choose the option to save it in a larger format first and after the recording, the program starts the compression on it's own. New profiles can off course be created and edited; DivX, xvid,..

The quality in 1-pass DivX is good enough to play back on a TV-screen and that's what I'm using it for.
I've one big server with 0.5TB HD-space, that acts like a timed videorecorder. Through LAN, those recordings can be opened on every PC in the house, including a SS51-shuttle in the living room, connected to a TV. No need for videotapes anymore and it works VERY easy. I'm used to Adobe Premiere and such, but showshifter is absolutely great for easy TV-recording. For semi-professional video-capturing it's off course not an option. But that's not really possible with TV-cards either.

The program works best with my Hauppauge TV-card (you need VDW-drivers though, from the Hauppauge site). My Pinnacle PCI-TV isn't that good supported and I have to figure it out how to get it to work as good as the Hauppauge. (if ever)

Trial version:
www.showshifter.com