I've tried to do a number of rips from the various Sky Movies channels using a set-top DVD recorder and GK, but more often than not the DVD is virtually unwatchable on a PC due to ghosting although it looks fine on a TV.

My question is, has anyone tried capping Sky using more conventional methods, is the problem the DVD recorder or Sky itself? I guessed at the DVD recorder but bearing in mind that football looks bad on Sky I'm not sure

Ghosting is a known problem with DVDrecorders (I think PCA has experience with this, I know he has had a few set-top recorders)

To answer the question, ses, my current releasing is from Scifi channel on sky digital (see series section of scifi.dead-donkey.com , Babylon 5: Crusade). I also capped league of gentlemen S3 and have got Indiana Jones: Demons of Deception on my pc for encoding.

I have experienced slight ghosting capping from sky too, but I believe it is from the deinterlacing filter I was using. The same effect you can get from terrestrial tv too.

Football looks bad on sky since the bbc doesn't send enough bitrate in their feeds btw. I don't have sky sports so I can't tell, but BBC could really do with upping the bitrate on some of their shows. I've noticed some of the channels don't seem technically knowledgeable enough about video formats and transmission, which is one of the most stupid things I can think of for a TV station employee.

I do not have the movie channels (I've got or seen most of the movies shown), but its worth pointing out that they are encrypted a lot... you need to make sure you are macrodecoding

Thanks Spud, I thought it was probably the DVD recorder

I'll try capping something off the SciFi channel and see how I get on with that, I'm pretty sure I am macrodecoding, we paid enough for the software mods :-o

Tremors 2 and Sleepstalker are the movies on sci-fi tonight if u need something to test it on