My cable company provides (for a monthly charge) a Scientific Atlanta brand cable receiver and hard-disk recorder. I like to collect old movies, and making good DVD-R copies is nice.

What I usually do is to record things off of, say, Turner Classic Movies using the cable company's menus. Now, I'm sure that the image on the cable box disk is digital, and I want to get said image on to my computer . . . but so far as I can figure out, the box doesn't provide for any direct transfer. There's a USB port on it, but it's "for future use."

So, I'm reduced to connecting the yellow, red and white RCA ports on the cable box to a Video Xpress device, and playing back the movie so that it gets sent through a USB port and saved in an mpeg file on my computer's drive. This takes place in real time, i.e., two hours for a typical movie.

At that point I can run any of several programs to edit the mpeg file and burn it to a DVD-R. The results aren't bad, but I must be losing some resolution in turning the signal to analog and back, right? (I could use S-Video instead of the yellow cable, but I guess the improvement would be minimal.)

Are there third party disk-recorders that I should consider to replace (or supplement) my cable box, ones that would permit direct copy of files from their disk?

Or is there some kind of video card for the computer that I could connect to the cable signal and have the video recorded directly to my computer's drive?

Any ideas are appreciated.

are you using composite feed or S-video? What type of OS are you running? Media Center ed. would work perfectly fine, besides the fact that its very quite expensive.

I can use either S-Video or the RCA video plug. But I've noted no appreciable difference.

I have encountered TV cards that would let you seem to capture the signal directly to the computer HD. These sound like a good deal, except that they would effectively tie up the computer for the duration of the movie, I suspect.