On 9/20/05, Tony McDowell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > the main purpose of our machine is for recording / encoding > video for playback *only* on our TV, what are some good encoding settings? > > I am pretty sure that I will encode at 640x480 but don't know about any > other settings or how they will affect file size. For a normal 1-hour show > (most of our favorites are this long), what kind of file sizes am I looking > at? This will affect the size of the hard disk I buy for the storage.
First off, you can never have enough hard disk space, and sooner or later a hard drive is going to fail and you're going to wish that you had RAID. Okay, so... If you stick with 720x480 and the stock settings in mythtv and a PVR-X50 card, you're probably going to burn about 2.1GB PER HOUR for recordings. I tuned the recording settings down so that my shows take just under 1gb per 30 minute show. This makes it easy to fit more content onto DVDs for me. I set my settings for mythtranscode to be somewhat aggressive, I bump resolution down, I bump audio rate down, and have decreased the min/max bitrate settings. This lets me transcode shows I don't want to burn to DVD, or want to watch later and store them while only taking about 900MB PER HOUR. Most of the time, I can't tell any difference. I'm away from my system, so I can't give any more specific info, but that should help you get started with planning. You should start with default values and adjust them *SLIGHTLY* (probably down), test and repeat until you find the best settings for you. I would plan on buying a 400gb drive if you're going to store all of your recordings on that drive. -Ross _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
