Well I hope this is quick anyway:
I have a Hauppauge 150 and I had been recording to an MPEG file at 12 MB/sec because I figured that would give me the best quality. It also gave me file sizes that were roughly 6.2 GB per hour of a recorded show. I have changed it now to 2 MB/sec and it looks the same as it did at 12.
Here is what I would like to know. What settings should I record at to get the best quality at the lowest file size? Also, somewhat unrelated to my Hauppauge tuner, if I downloaded a tv show off BitTorrent, the quality is way better than what I record at and the file size is tiny (Granted it's an avi file, not an mpeg, but still). How are they recording, removing commercials, encoding to get a 400 MB avi file?
Thanks for your help and here are the MPEG recording settings for my Hauppauge card in case you didn't know what they were:
- DVD ELP
- DVD LP
- DVD SP
- MPEG1 VCD - MPEG 2 2.0MB/sec
- MPEG 2 2.0MB/sec (Half D1)
- MPEG 2 12.0MB/sec
- MPEG 2 12.0MB/sec (CBR)
- SVCD LP
- SVCD SP
In my case I have sagetv using the pvr150 tuner card. I have my recording at 1.6 gb/hour. For me that's good enough. I couldn't tell a difference from 2.0gb and 1.6gb.
Next I use videoredo (cost me 49.00) to edit the mpeg files, it has a built-in commercial skip function, that can save some time in removing the commercials. And this program is quick, it will reedit your mpeg file without reencoding, no lose in quality during editing.
Finally I use Winavi converter(cost me 29.00) to convert the mpegs into xvid files. I use the default codecs but make sure the output file is 640x480. With Winavi I can batch convert up to 200 mpeg files at a time. The default codecs are very fast and the quality is similar to the original mpegs.
The finished xvid will be half the size of the mpeg and will play on every player I've thrown it at.
Jony, do you think you could give me a quick overview of how you convert to an Xvid? I tried using WinAVI and put the output to 640x480 but it is neither fast (it usually hangs with 18 minutes to go) nor half the size, when I quit the program, the file was nearly double the size. Any help you can give would be appreciated.
