High quality : useless for SD TV ?

[nc_pvr]

Ok,

I've got GB-PVR running on my main computers, recording standard cable TV shows a few times a week.

I'm recording at full quality and feeding the recordings to my TV through Media MVP.

I've never really tried the lower quality settings to see the difference.

A one hour show usually takes up around 2.5GB which is a little to big for my taste as I only have a 60GB drive. Let's say I can't record more than 4 shows before it gets full. I'm pondering the option of buying a 250B drive but I want to look at other options first.

What should I do with my recordings ? Record at lower quality or convert them to divx or xvid or else ? Keep in mind I want to keep the best quality possible but I also watch these recordings through Media MVP on a regular 28" Sony TV.

Thanks for the input !

[daveid]

compress em to xvid, heres a screenshot from one of my recordings. its 20 minutes long and 125MB

[gEd]

nc_pvr: Just get a bigger HD - 60G is nowhere near enough for a pvr system.

Converting the mpeg files to xvid can take ages and gbpvr will only have to convert them back (to mpeg) again in order for you to watch them on the mvp (which only accepts mpeg output). Again, this requires a reasonably high spec pc to do this in realtime.

daveid: Looks good - however cartoons do convert very well to xvid as you have frequently have large areas that are the void of detail and are the same colour. "Regular" tv is more of a problem, especially with fast moving scenes.

[daphatty]

Definitely get a bigger HD.

[daveid]

a series of frame grabs from married... with children, the only ffdshow filter being applied is SPP deblocking. this is xvid ~120megabytes for ~20 minutes. with vorbis audio.
however, about needing to be able to quickly transcode to mpeg2 for another device, i know nothing about.. i don't think you will be able to accomplish that with any compressed video.