Recorded files are way too large

[douggoodwin]

I did my first manual recording for 2 hours. The file was almost 10 gigs which is about 10 times larger than I wanted it to be. How do I change this?

[mvallevand]

The best solution is to change your expectations and if necessary buy a drive too match your needs. NextPVR just records what the broadcasters send. Your QAM captures are not bad, OTA ATSC can be 8GB/hr and you goal is .5 is difficult to achieve with good results. There are transcoding options that will compress your files to h264 and even reduce to SD res. but they take time and lots of cpu. Search here for postprocessing and mcebuddy to see how others have tackled this.

Martin

[douggoodwin]

Thanks for the insight. One of the reason I started this little project was to avoid having to download tv shows online. These downloads are usually posted soon after they are aired and are about 500 to 600 mb per hour.
Do you think the uppers are using a similar cable card and compressing down to this size? Is there another type of hardware on the market that records smaller files?

[Deev8]

One of the reason I started this little project was to avoid having to download tv shows online. These downloads are usually posted soon after they are aired and are about 500 to 600 mb per hour. Do you think the uppers are using a similar cable card and compressing down to this size?

Yes the TV shows that you have previously downloaded are re-encoded to reduce the file size. The process also reduces the video quality to a greater or lesser degree. As said above you could re-encode your recordings yourself, which might be worthwhile if you want to keep them long-term. However doing that does take some time - a re-encode can take longer than watching the TV show - and quite a bit of computer processing power. If you aren't keeping the recordings for the long-term the best answer is usually buying a bigger disk.

[mvallevand]

Is there another type of hardware on the market that records smaller files?

The only real alternative is analog HD capturing with the hdpvr to a lower bit rate, I get 2.6 GB/hr but I max it at 16 Mbs so they could be smaller. Given that you are using a Ceton Infinitv replacing that with 3 or 4 HDPVR's and STB's would probably cost as much as buying 20 TB (4 TB are about $180 these days)

Martin

[ga_mueller]

And seriously, with that 4TB drive you can store like 800hrs of HD video (off cable it's 5GB/hr for me) ... who needs that much storage?