Archiving Widescreen Content from the SA8300HD

[gordonb]

As some of you may have noticed I'm on a somewhat quixotic campaign to attempt to get Rogers to activate the Firewire ports on their High Defenition (HD) Set Top Boxes (STBs) and PVRs.

Quite simply put all I want is the same "fair use" that I had with standard definition content and my VCR - the ability to copy content to off-line media so I can watch it when I want to.

I have had some success recently archiving content from my 8300HD and I thought I would share my experiences.

Big Fat Disclaimer - Yes, I know the methods I am using are not HD but I find the quality acceptable for wide-screen content.

My first attempt involved using the S-Video output. This resulted in a letter-boxed output that when burned to a DVD looked horrible. Partly I suspect because of the encoding to a Luminance (Y) and Chrominance (C) channel and also due to the decrease in vertical resolution due to the letterboxing and the subsequent requirement to "zoom" the content on playback.

I noticed on VideoGuys a couple of capture boxes that were capable of capting from Component to DV (D1). I reasoned that their would be less garbage in the YUV component output than in the S-Video and that I might be able to capture 480i widescreen as it is anamorphic and similar to what one finds on a standard DVD.

I picked up a ADS Tech Pyro A/V Link from Tiger Direct for $191 plus shipping as it was the lowest cost solution, available from a Canadian retailer and includes a full version of Adobe Premier Elements (a $130 value at FS).

After some tweaking I managed to capture a widescreen feature played back from my 8300HD via component. I had to configure Premiere for a 16x9 aspect ratio project and then tell it to convert the pixel aspect ratio of the captured file from 0.9 (4:3) to 1.2 (16:9). I then trimmed the file and burned it to DVD with no menus. Popped the DVD into my DVD player and voila! A excellent widescreen archived copy of the content was displayed.

Things I want to work on at this point are de-interlacing the content and how to include DD5.1 sound (Premier does not support 5.1 currently).