Capturing to PVR/DVR

Does anybody here cut Fraps out of the equation altogether and capture directly to something like a PVR/DVR?

Is it possible to get such hardware without a TV tuner, which takes its digital video feed directly from a PC? Even better if it could capture video via a graphics card's second DVI port because I imagine that wouldn't be as resource intensive as capturing via USB.

Am I dreaming here?

My nVidia cards have had an s-video jack on them which I thought could be used as a secondary output. A quick check shows this is so*. Thus you could take a hardware line out of the graphics adapter and plug directly into a DVR. Hope that helps.

*http://nvidia.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/nvidia.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=177&p_created=1101837165&p_sid=RP9kY2Qi&p_accessibility=0&p_redirect=&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9MiwyJnBfcHJvZHM9MCZwX2NhdHM9MCZwX3B2PSZwX2N2PSZwX3NlYXJjaF90eXBlPWFuc3dlcnMuc2VhcmNoX25sJnBfcGFnZT0xJnBfc2VhcmNoX3RleHQ9c3ZpZGVv&p_li=&p_topview=1

Oh, mine has S-Video too. Only just noticed that. It's so dimly lit down there. =D (It's an XFX NVidia 7950GT.)

My current PVR records the raw MPEG stream from digital TV and you can transfer those files onto a PC with a USB lead, but unfortunately when recording from a PC, the signal gets converted to analogue (S-Video > UHF) before the PVR digitizes it again. So it's lossy. Unfortunately, I think a lossy SL recording looks much worse than a lossy TV broadcast.

I hope I'm making sense. I have a bit of money to spare right now and was hoping to get a DVR that could capture the raw digital stream instead of re-digitizing one that came through an analogue input.

God I'm bad at expressing myself when technical jargon enters the equation.

I cutout Fraps... lol.. I use HyperCam... but only to capture uncompressed footage. Never tried it to DVR/PVR, as I have large/fast HD's. One postproduced I do create DVD quality and burn it for some clients, and the Sony Vegas rendering engine can save directly to DVR/PVR anyway. A Firewire connection might be better than S-Video.

My LCD flatscreen TV comes with a direct Firewire connection for the PC and shows in digital format without codex, gives great resolution as it also has a 8ms resonce time.

You know, I've got a state of the art 42" plasma telly and I couldn't tell you what ports it has on the back. Just that it has an awful lot of them. My PC monitor has an 8ms response time too, but unfortunately not a built in PVR. =D

I've got a Topfield TF5800 PVR (did I say that already? ) which has component video (?) ports. I wonder if they are of any use. The manual is in badly translated Korean so I must investigate further. I don't fancy transporting the PVR between living room and study every time I want to make machinima though. That's why I was thinking I might spend up to a couple of hundred quid on something dedicated to the task.

Your TV, may have a connection called PC. You may need to get a cable that has firewire on one end that plugs to your PC. Mine also has a DMI socket so can be driven directly from the GC in digital.
Composite connections are for RGB for HDTV, which is an extension to the Scart 720i, to 1440i resolution. From my recollection, Plasma screens require a seperate tuner, which can be builtin with some models, but are dumb slaves in others. You can drive them from PC's, DVD's etc as long as they modulate the signal beforehand.