I love watching and saving my favorite shows on my computer. But, there are many catches to watch out for. I love to bash Microsoft, but Microsoft is only a small part of the problem. The real problem is complicity of video on computers.
I try to be accurate, but due to the convoluted nature of the subject, I can only be certain of my own experience. I try to digest online references as much as I can, but after much researching I still keep finding getting confused, then correct my understanding, only to get confused again shortly later.
I have used ATI's All-in-Wonder (original and Radeon). I had poor results with the first, and was hoping that the second would finally get me to video nirvana. When I used the Ulead editor program that came with my second ATI card, I would have antagonizingly slow response to my editing commands and processing the video to the desired edits. I don't know how much of that slowness is due to crappy design, but I am sure that a lack of computer power has much to do with the slowness. My previous computer was a 1.4 Gigahertz. My new computer is effectively two 3.0 Gigahertz processors. Now I can navigate and issue edit commands with occasional slowdowns. The video processing is done at just a little faster than real time with both processors running near capacity. Maybe I should have bought a workstation specializing in video editing like Avid, but I don't know much about such systems.
When I had a slow dial-up connection to the Internet, I saved copies of drivers for future reinstallation. But as my Internet connection speed and the number of computer hardware components increased, I got tired of organizing all those driver in storage, and new driver versions kept coming which I could quickly download. I constantly had problems with some hardware, so I was discourage from keeping each version of many drivers, since there did not seem to be a particularly good version. Not keeping drivers was a big mistake. One example was when I was updating a motherboard's BIOS. Things went from not fine to really bad. I delete the previous BIOS version that I downloaded earlier. The motherboard manufacturer did only have the newest version of the BIOS available on their website. I had to talk to tech support few times to talk them into giving me the previous version of the BIOS. They cluelessly did not think that this could fix the problem.
The video example is my Radeon video card. The drivers that came on the CD-ROM disc had problems with saving television. I started downloading newer drivers as soon as they became available. I could then save television, but I always had stability issues with the software, so I never permanently kept any copies. As time went I started to have more issues with the video files that I stored. It took me a year to figure out that the drivers were intended for new cards of the Radeon family. They just slopped together drivers for all Radeons, but the all the drivers on their archive collections already did not support my Radeon. ATI did not clearly mark nor direct people to which drivers are good for which card.
I built a computer for my mother from some my old hardware components. Since the computer is slow, I wanted to use an old operating system. But, the manufacturers of the video and sound cards have already pulled the drivers for the older operating system. Fortunately I did not have any problems with the drivers on the CD-ROM discs that I finally found in my massive basement. Tech support for the sound card said they pulled support that card since it is too old, and that I need to buy a newer sound card. It was about three years old at the time.
I am only talking about consumer digital audio connections here.
In 2000 I bought my first receiver and sound card that could do Dolby Digital decoding and had digital audio connections. I was ecstatic with joy. I thought that I could simply connect one digital cable between the sound card and the receiver and get 5.1 sound. I ran the speaker tests from the sound card's software, but only my front speakers responded. I thought that I will have this figured out eventually. Later when I tried everything in the sound card's software and changing connections, I thought that the sound card or receiver is broken or buggy. I like the sound that I did get and simply forgot about it. I wasn't play DVDs and I am not hardcore about having the absolutely perfect experience with my 3D video games. I made a stupid mistake, I bought another top model of Sound Blaster in 2005 (X-Fi Elite Pro) thinking it would change the situation. I will explain in a moment why this might be a good thing.
The first clue what was wrong was when I took my parents DVD player in 2006 and plugged it into my receiver. And, I finally saw my receiver display "Dolby Digital" on its display for the first time and I heard awesome sound like I have never heard before except in a movie theaters. Now I know how things should work. This provoked me to finally do some serious research on the Internet. I found out that S/PDIF was design for the original two channels of CD-audio. When consumer home theater systems were to be upgraded from Dolby Pro Logic to Dolby Digital, the 5.1 channels were compressed to fit the same bandwidth as the old stereo signal. The good part is that this saves space on DVDs. The bad news is that it is a lossy compression format. Many sound cards now have S/PDIF connections and several analog connections.
The digital connections that I am talking about are called S/PDIF, which comes in two forms, optical (also known as TOSLINK) and coaxial. I have been a moderate audiophile for years and heard of digital connectors for CD players and really good receivers/amplifiers, but they were beyond my budget, so I did not research into them. Do to my ignorance, when I got my first digital capable receiver, I thought that its connectors are a new kind invented for new digital surround sound systems (Dolby Digital and DTS). I assume that you can't put 5.1 channels where only 2 use to be, and of course the capitalists must of made new connectors. I was onto something with that thought.
The optical jack in the picture has a hinged flap cover an opening. Many optical jacks have plugs that you pull off when you want to connect cable and will look very different, but the connectors take the same cables.
Notice that the coaxial jack looks like an RCA connector, and it is mechanically identical, so you might be able to use your RCA analog audio cable if it is a high quality, but you can buy cable specifically design for SPDIF. I have used analog cable successfully.
One of the first things I knew about digital video is that MPEG was THE industrial standard. DVD's use this for their video. And now HDTV uses MPEG. It keeps on running as the gold standard. Cell phones, portable players, satellite television, and high definition discs are going to a new standard call H.264 (also known as MPEG-4-AVC); to avoid getting tricked by various namings, just look for or ask for "H.264"; I've gotten that confused with (H.263, MPEG-4-ASP, Divx, Xvid, and the list goes on).
What I have seen less often are video editing programs being hard coded for numerous codecs (not just MPEG-2). For the most part, when you are picking an output format, you get a list of codecs based on what are registered with your operating system and on some programs that list is restricted to the codecs that are supported by the program.
Go to my DivX plugin site for details. I know that it has a bad reputation, but unlike Microsoft, its problems have not been technical.
