Peak and AVG bitrate for a decent picture?

[dvasco]

What is the best balance of peak and avg bitrate for a decent picture. I am fairly satisfied with a ReplayTV filesize of 1.6 GB for 60 min of semi-action. Bitrate viewer shows them to be a peak of 7500 and avg of 3600 with audio at 192, 48kHz. So far I haven't been able to get a handle on what GBPVR should be with a hauppauge PVR-350. If I have to go to a much higher bitrate (larger file size) should I buy a larger drive or better capture card? ATI will be coming out with a Theater 650 Pro they state has better quality than TIVO. Tivo has even better quality than ReplayTV, but ReplayTV is better than Tivo in a lot of other features.

[Koenie]

If space is the problem why dont you transcode them to xvid. In xvid i use a quantizer of 7 instead of a (semi)fixed bitrate. This yields average video bitrates between 300 and 1500 kbits/s for studio shows and formula 1 races respectively. This way you use only the space you need and no more.

I have a batch file doing the transcoding using mencoder and use dirmon to automatically find the files to be transcoded.

This way you can record at a higher bitrate (than really necessary) and the file will be reduced in size afterwards solving the space issue and giving an at least as good quality video.

[replaytv]

I am setting mine to recording between 2500-2700 and watch recording shows via the MVP. The file comes out is the same as medium quality on the replayTV.

Dan L.

[dvasco]

I set GBPVR to the same as the ReplayTV, changed the codec to Nvidia PureVideo with film option (per another thread), and calibrated the TV display with GBPVR to match that of the ReplayTV. My TV has individual controls for each input and I used a GBPVR recording of America's Most Wanted and a ReplayTV recording of the exact same show. Therefore my source channel and show were the same. I used the AMW eagle as a guide. I had to only adjust the brightness and the picture.