Wide World of Women

Does the box actually record the video or do you have to have it hooked to your computer and record to your hard drive?

You have to have it hooked up to your computer.

thanks. wonder if they make 50' usb cables?

This might work.
http://www.yourcablestore.com/50-Foot-U ... _1057.html

In order to get Hi-Def I run my cable service to a HD DVR then to the PVR. I record everything to the DVR b/c it stores up to 40hrs. Then I decide what I want to cap or make vids from and record just those parts to my PC. The PVR will record video to your computer directly from a HD signal but the hard drive memory requirements are enourmous. I can't remember exactly (maybe someone knows exactly) but I'll bet ea hour recorded would be almost 7GB. Even though I have over a TB in drive space it is so much easier to handle all the storage issues on the DVR.

The following is a post I made a while back in another forum that I saved. Hope it helps. I can only say what works the easiest and fastest for me

My HD signal comes through my cable company DVR box. Then via the appropriate cables I send it to a Hauppauge PVR: http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hdpvr.html It’s about $200.00 but it gave me what I wanted. I can cap in HD and I can watch or record true HD TV on my PC. I love it! It comes w/a lot of software for editing vids, converting formats, making vids (see link).
I record all programs to the DVR first then replay and record brief segments that I want to get caps from using the PVR. The PVR can be set to record video to your computer just like a DVR but the space requirements would be way too much since I record at least 15hrs of news not to mention all my fav TV shows every day. I don’t cap from everything but you never know when a guest anchor will fill in (FOX for ex). I use MPC to playback the video because it seems to have the codecs for the best pic quality w/o gitter. Sometimes you’ll see a difference between my caps (sometimes darker in color, sometimes w/what I call some pixilation). That’s because I take the cap straight from the DVR feed because I don’t feel like recording it first (it’s not like I get paid for this) but I don’t use the player’s capture feature. I use one of many free screen capture programs. I prefer EasyCapture http://easycapture.soft32.com/ because it’s easy to use and free. I set the cap area to rectangle, designate a destination folder and what I really like is that I can enter any prefix I want (ex. screencap…) then every time I scroll the desired cap area and release the left mouse click it automatically is entered in the folder incremented by one (screencap33, screencap34, etc). It sounds like more work than grabbing a bunch of caps and sorting through but since I can almost move frame by frame w/MPC I usually get the exact cap I want because the video is paused and I’m looking at what I’m getting.
I use infranview as has been mentioned. I couldn’t live w/o it. I’m constantly re-sizing for one reason or another. But I do usually leave my caps like I get them at 1980x1080 because I figure then everyone can re-size to whatever they desire.
That’s all I think of. Actually even more than you wanted to know.
Oh yeh, maybe not 100% necessary, but I highly suggest 4GB of RAM.

Thanks for the info.