best compression

[lowfront]

any suggestions on best compression?

[stefan]

For what? I mean... generally lower compression would get better quality... but I'm sensing you want to know something else here...

[lowfront]

best way to compress the mpeg

[buckeye]

best way to compress the mpeg

i don't get your question ?

what exactly do you want to do

[stefan]

What do you want to compress into? divx? xvid? Smaller size mpeg?

[lowfront]

whatever realy thats why im asking just whats the best way to do it...

quality would be important but I would like the shrink the size...

[robeoh]

I think this is one of those 'seems like a simple question' situations when you are a newbie (like me) but has, obviously, many levels to it. I will be installing a MediaMVP one of these days and wonder what type of compression is compatible with this device. Also, how do you integrate other encoder/decoders into gbpvr? Is there a performance hit using other compression technologies. Thanks in advance.

[sub]

If you're going to be using an MVP, you're best to leave your video as MPEG2, since it can only play MPEG1/MPEG2 natively. Other file types have serious limitations and require conversion to MPEG format on the fly.

[reboot]

At best, you could re-encode everything to VCD, which is 352x240/288 at 1150kbps CBR (constant bitrate).
That's as much compression as you can (reasonably) get, and still have a watchable recording.
Personally, VCD quality sucks, and I'd never do it.

A quick lesson on aspect ratios and bitrate:

Full D1 (which all hardware mpeg-2 cards record to) is 720x480/576 (480 NTSC and 576 PAL).
Reasonable viewing quality bitrate for full D1 is about 4000kbps, no lower, and actually much better at 6000-8000, with 9000 (plus audio) being the peak that most set top DVD players can handle on a burned (not commercially pressed) DVD.

Half D1, 480x480/576. Yes, this is also SVCD aspect. Being half the physical size width, one can reasonably half the bitrate, and still get a good quality video. 2500kbps is my recommended minimum. This brings the file size down by almost half (2/5).

Quarter D1, 352x240/288. This is fully DVD compliant (being VCD aspect), yet requires less bitrate, because of the smaller aspect. One can (should) still use mpeg-2, not mpeg-1 (VCD) for this to be compliant. VBR bitrates as low as 1500 kbps are reasonable. This brings file size down by almost half again. (actually 2/5).

What this all means, is that you could re-encode all your full D1 recordings to quarter D1, and the resulting file will be less than half the size of the original.

Caveat: Reducing aspect ratio/bitrate makes for reasonable quality video, when viewed on a small TV or computer monitor only.
If you intend to play back these videos on a larger TV, thus increasing the aspect back to full D1, they will appear very poor quality.

If you use other types of compression (DivX, XviD, Huffyuv, mjpeg, wmv, mov, etc.), the bitrate rules do not apply to filesize. Each compression codec has different compression, so an MOV at 4000kbps will be much smaller than an mpeg-2 at 4000kbps, yet much larger than a DivX at 4000kbps.
The MPV and PVR-350 will not play back anything but mpeg-1/2 (natively, as sub has explained), so there's really no point in recompressing/encoding a file to a smaller aspect, or bitrate.

If you must archive your recordings, do it to disk (straight mpeg as data even) and add the drive to your playback folders in config.
It's up to you, if you want to take the time, to archive things to other compression formats.