Ideal quality settings?

[theredbaron]

Hey,
I've been searching the forums for a while, and I'm having trouble getting the info i need regarding quality and file size. Basically, I want to be able to do several things:
1) Record shows in good quality, strip commercials, and burn episodes onto dvd-r. I want to be able to fit several episodes onto a dvd if possible
2) Be able to convert certain mpeg2 recordings to xvid, for practical/portable purposes. I'd like reduced filesizes without too much compromise to the quality.

What tools do I need do achieve these things?

I understand bitrates and stuff conceptually, but I'm having trouble thinking of them in application. So if someone can give me a few pointers regarding tweaking the quality settings in terms of "watchability" and filesize, i would greatly appreciate it.

[gEd]

well the out of the box settings are pretty good.

1) You need to figure out how long each episode it and how many episodes you want to burn to a dvd. Given that the max video rate is 9800 kb/s and 4.7GB capacity 9single layer) you can then calculate a bitrate for audio & video that will need your requirements.

1a comskip is used to detect commercials and comclean to use the output files to remove the commercials from the file. takes some tweaking to get it right.

here is a calculator

http://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=Vide...calculator

2) search the forums for xvid, ffmpeg, memcoder and transcoding. there are loads of threads on compressing video files.

such as:-

http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php...ght=ffmpeg

http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php...ght=ffmpeg