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April 9, 2004
What's the best 'quality' to record TV shows?
I bought a great TV tuner (OEM version of Happauge PVR-250 card-$80; now up to $95, list $150).
http://www.z-buy.com/product.asp?item=VG-HA32552
http://www.hauppauge.com/html/wintvpvr250_datasheet.htm
I bought a great piece of software (SnapStream's Beyond TV 3.4-$69)
http://snapstream.com/Products/Products_PVS3.asp
I hooked my cable directly from the wall to the computer for the first time.
http://www.rcn.com :-)
Now I have really nice picture quality, an MPEG-2 hardware encoder, and the flexibility to record pretty much whatever 'basic' cable shows I want. The only problem is disk space.
I want to be able to record 1 hour of TV (ideally, post-commercials so ~45-48 minutes) onto a single CD. 700mb CDs should be ok, 640 preferred... I don't know how to do this 'well'.
The other caveat is that I need to be able to watch the shows on MacOS X, Windows, and Linux. I don't think this will be a huge problem because I can use mplayer (which has handled everything I've thrown at it, on MacOS X and Linux) on all 3 platforms if necessary.
Any ideas? I'll stick what I've tried in the 'Extended Entry'. Thanks...
With the default "MPEG2 NTSC DVD Low Resolution" it records at 352x480, 40000000 bps (I think), and it ends up being about 1.9gb per hour.
I've tried various settings as recommended on one web site or another - I actually don't remember what most of them were - and found them not to work. Many of them didn't work because my card only supports certain resolutions, and drops down to some insanely low bit rate if I ask it to do something it doesn't like.
I've downloaded episodes I've missed from the internet, and they seem to be about 480mb for a 1-hour show that some great person has already edited the commercials out of. :-) Maybe the best answer is to rely on others to do this for me, but I'd be happier with a mechanism for doing it myself.
Yawn. As a last resort, I can have SnapStream automatically re-render (ShowSqueeze™) the shows to some Windows Media format, but that would (obviously) not be my top preference... And if I actually wanted to make a VCD / SVCD it would have to be re-rendered back to MPEG which would just suck. *grin*
So the ultimate goal is to:
1) Record an hour to approx. 640mb, -OR- have some simple (batch job or drag & drop) method for compressing the video to 640mb.
2) Burn the resulting file onto CD, as a data file (.mpg, .avi, ?) AND be able to burn the file as a SVCD to play on a standard DVD player.
3) Be able to play the resulting 640mb-ish file on Mac, PC, Linux.
4) Know how to 'improve' the quality such that I can get a good quality, 2-hour recording onto a DVD-R (also playable everywhere) if I ever want to (unlikely, but...)
5) Have a good way to strip out the commercials to get the source down from an hour to ? whatever less.
Note that this is all for my personal archiving, instead of videotape, and that I _DO_ purchase "Season" DVDs of the shows that Amy or I like best; this is not an attempt to be cheap, it's an attempt to watch TV on the train for my commute, rather than having to take time at home, without filling my disk with shows.
Posted by aland at April 9, 2004 9:18 AM
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Try recording in VCD or SVCD quality. MPEG1 for VCD and MPEG2 (lower res than DVD) for SVCD.
For even smaller files with better quality you can try Divx, but I don't know if there are codecs for MAC and LINUX (although I would think there would be).
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Posted by: Mike at April 12, 2004 9:56 AM