Graph Recorder Questions from Potential New User

[fyodor]

Hi

I am considering switching over to GB-PVR from SageTV. Since I get a lot of my content from firewire, I had some questions on how well this worked.

1. How reliable is it generally? For recording? Watching live TV? Several of the PVR packages have different levels of success.

2.I noticed that the setup allows for different graphs to be used (high vs. low, etc). What's the motivation for this? Is there something that I should keep in mind when configuring it?

3. Can this be used with content that is dumped in mpeg4 formats? I'm thinking of transcoding lower quality content directly to xvid.

[pBS]

well, i don't have firewire so i can't answer #1 but for #2 those are so you can adjust the compression settings in the graph to have low, medium and high bitrate encodes...or resolution,etc..

#3 it only outputs .mpg as filename, so if you can make graph that recompresses the .mp4 into a .mpg it would work..
[really just add the appropriate input filters to read the mp4 to the regular ati encoding graph]
look at the examples of graphs using the ati encoders as they are pretty low cpu usage and just change the input filters..

[carpeVideo]

The graph for firewire is very simple and it is fairly reliable, occasionally you need to repower the STB.

Sage uses the exact same method so the reliability should be very similar.

Quality wise it is what you get from your cable provider since it is already digital so it can be very good on HD but sometimes they compress the heck out of some channels (as opposed to what PBS was saying for analog recording)

Since depending on your provider not all channels will be available on firewire you need to capture the other channels another way (I use s-video to get the other channels). This is where you can change the quality of the recording (via different graphs) although its still limited by the channels original quality. Since both firewire and s-video are from the same source (the STB) it is important that the scheduler treats both as one so there are no conflicts. The graphRecorder plug-in can do this, unsure if Sage will.

Any files that you get can be transcoded given time and pressure :o) If you have a really fast PC you might be able to do it live but I'd recommend batching the jobs for late night.

[fyodor]

Thanks! This is very helpful. I am going to give this a try, I think.