recording size

[gunterhausfrau]

I went from a Hauppage 350 to the 2250. Went from analog to digital. Now I am seeing that my recording size has ~900k for a 1/2 hr show to ~3.4gig. Previously you could choose a lower quality (smaller) file, is there a way that can be done with the digital? or is it again time to buy a bigger HD.

Thanks.

[sub]

With digital, the size file you end up with depends on the bitrate etc the broadcaster decided to use for that channel. There is no GB-PVR settings that change this.

or is it again time to buy a bigger HD.

Yep...

[Reddwarf]

But you can convert it to a lower bitrate/quality using FFMPEG or MENCODER?

[sub]

But you can convert it to a lower bitrate/quality using FFMPEG or MENCODER?

True - but personally, I'd rather just stick with the original higher quality files.

[Reddwarf]

A lower bitrate does not nessesarily make a movie look bad, from my expirience with h264 encoding it looks like it's a matter of smart encoding. And aren't direct broadcast's always encoded with a fixed bitrate? If that is the case a variable bitrate would significantly decrease the size.

[sub]

Each to their own...

[Anthony]

Besides the potential quality loss, the downside to transcoding to another format is time. Even with a quad core processor it can take nearly as long to transcode a show as it would take to watch it. If you routinely delete shows after watching them, it doesn't make sense to waste time transcoding.

Transcoding to h264 or MP4 might make sense for a movie you want to archive, or to reduce the size of music videos. But for daily time-shifting of TV shows, keeping the original is a lot less work. Even a 250gig hard drive would be adequate for most folks, but for just a few dollars more you can have 500-1000 gigs or more.

Having said that, I did just start transcoding my original MPEG2 recordings to MKV format using MKVMerge. I keep the original MPEG2 video and AC3 audio, so there's no reencoding involved. The streams just get repackaged into a new MKV container file and only adds a few minutes of extra processing for each show. I started doing this to improve compatibility with my Tvix M6500 media player, but it does have a side benefit of "slightly" smaller file sizes.

Anthony

[Reddwarf]

Agreed, there is no point in transcoding a show that you record, watch shortly after and delete. But in our country, there are lots of good shows shortly before and during the weekend, and since there are only 24 hours in a day and one also have other things to do, a recorded show can be keept for sevral days before it is watched (on days with almost nothing to watch). So when slightly short of disk space, it is nice to be able to reduce the size without loosing too much quality.

Personally I have an automated system that transcodes all recordings during late night and early morning hours, so it's no extra work for me, just for the cpu, and it enjoys having something to do .

[Deusxmachina]

If it's being transcoded for short-term use like that, by all means I'd use xvid. It may be 25% or so bigger than h.264, but it's much faster, and still much smaller than 3.4gb. I'd also use Constant Quality mode, (note: not constant bitrate), and not two-pass. Two-pass is usually a waste of time.

If it's a keeper show, I'd do it right the first time with h.264, but then I'd be editing out the commercials first, too.

I don't know if you're a native English speaker, but if you're not, you write it very well. Since this is an international forum, I thought I'd toss this out -- that "loose" and "loosing" are the opposites of "tight." The correct words are "lose" and "losing."

Normally, I wouldn't say anything, but I see so many native English speakers using "loose" and "loosing" nowadays, and I think it's the power of the internet causing it. One person misspells it on a popular website, and it spreads from there, and then multilingual speakers pick it up from them.

Reminds me of a Japanese, Japanese-language teacher I had. One time the American students corrected her on some English, and she said, "Oh, ok," as if they had it right. But she had it right, and the five of them had it wrong. It's years later now, and sometimes I wonder if she believed them and has been doing it wrong ever since due to them.

[BTJustice]

http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=41294