What Quality setting to use for best bang for the buck?

[kelemvor]

Howdy,

I'm planning on using Sage primarly for it's automatic recording feature of my "favorite" shows. Just wondering what quality setting you would recommend if the end result is to watch the shows on TV and not on DVD.

Let's say I want to make my own DVD set of a series so I want to get the most data/episodes on one DVD but don't want them to look like crap either.

I've played a bit with some of the standard settings and I think Great got me jsut shy of 3 gigs per hour and SVCD got around 1.2 gigs per hour. I've seen full 2 hours movies on CD before (VCS/SVCD?) and they looked nice. Do I need to record the show with sage and then re-encode it with Divx or something to get the size down?

Just looking for options and ideas on the best way to accomplish this.

Thanks.

[Lucas]

If you are recording from an external STB via SVideo (ie the signal is good) you can get away with the DVD EP setting - around 1.3Gb per hour - provide you want watch them on a big(larger than 32") screen.
Otherwise DVD Long Play - around 2Gb per hour - should suffice...

But note that for of the air analog TV recordings the signal is not always good and at DVD EP and LP there are plenty of compression artifacts.

[kelemvor]

I'm talking about a standard cable TV signal coming in on a Coax connection to the card and just recording the shows I like and being able to organize them and burn them to DVD for keeping instead of leaving them on the Hard Drive.

Quality would be as good as any cable connection I guess...

[teedublu]

This custom setting (requires two lines added to sage.properties) fits exactly two hours onto a 4.7GB DVD -- BUT this is just a Data DVD compatible file (mpg). Just burn as data DVD and then when you want to watch, just put in the DVD, tell Sage to reimport videos, then you can use Sage to play it. I use it as my Default as it is slightly better than Great.

http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...ghlight=2.35GB

TW

[cmaffia]

I use GREAT setting and I can fit average length movies on DVD without a problem. The DVD come out really good.

Originally Posted by teedublu

This custom setting (requires two lines added to sage.properties) fits exactly two hours onto a 4.7GB DVD -- BUT this is just a Data DVD compatible file (mpg). Just burn as data DVD and then when you want to watch, just put in the DVD, tell Sage to reimport videos, then you can use Sage to play it. I use it as my Default as it is slightly better than Great.

http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...ghlight=2.35GB

TW

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by kelemvor

I've seen full 2 hours movies on CD before (VCS/SVCD?) and they looked nice. Do I need to record the show with sage and then re-encode it with Divx or something to get the size down?

Those are (since you say "looked nice") definitely DivX/Xvid encoded. DivX/Xvid are MPEG-4 based codecs and much more efficient than MPEG-2 (which the PVR 250 records in). About the most you can get on a CD in MPEG-2 is 74 Minutes with SVCD (480x480).

Couple things with regard to encoding quality and file size. Even within a given codec (say MPEG-2) the sophisication of the encoder plays a very large role in the quality of the recording. 2 examples:

MPEG-2:
A PVR 250 uses roughly 6Mbps for what I would call, great quality (no artifiacts). The multi-million (maybe an exageration) encoders used by cable/sat companies can get equal or greater quality with only about 2-3Mbps (I captured some digital cable with my MyHD and checked out the bitrates with TSReader ).

MPEG-4:
It's possible to get good results with MPEG-4 at about 1/5 the bitrate of MPEG-2, ie you can take a movie, that was ~5GB, and get it down to about 1GB with similar quality with MPEG-4. Of course that's if you encode it "offline", ie not in realtime, so very complex algorithms can be used. In contrast, the Plextor ConvertX, which can record directly to DivX, isn't that good (has to use less complex encoder) as a result the most optomistic appraisal I've heard is that MPEG-4 with the ConvertX requires about half the bitrate of MPEG-2.

OK, to answer your question, basically, it can't be answered. You'll have to try different bitrates for yourself and see where the quality starts to drop off. For me, Best (3GB/hour) is what I use, since it gives me great recordings, but not huge diskspace. I've also seen that one of the DVD qualities (the 1.8GB/hour one DVD Long Play?) gives pretty good results.

[kelemvor]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Those are (since you say "looked nice") definitely DivX/Xvid encoded. DivX/Xvid are MPEG-4 based codecs and much more efficient than MPEG-2 (which the PVR 250 records in). About the most you can get on a CD in MPEG-2 is 74 Minutes with SVCD (480x480).

Couple things with regard to encoding quality and file size. Even within a given codec (say MPEG-2) the sophisication of the encoder plays a very large role in the quality of the recording. 2 examples:

MPEG-2:
A PVR 250 uses roughly 6Mbps for what I would call, great quality (no artifiacts). The multi-million (maybe an exageration) encoders used by cable/sat companies can get equal or greater quality with only about 2-3Mbps (I captured some digital cable with my MyHD and checked out the bitrates with TSReader ).

MPEG-4:
It's possible to get good results with MPEG-4 at about 1/5 the bitrate of MPEG-2, ie you can take a movie, that was ~5GB, and get it down to about 1GB with similar quality with MPEG-4. Of course that's if you encode it "offline", ie not in realtime, so very complex algorithms can be used. In contrast, the Plextor ConvertX, which can record directly to DivX, isn't that good (has to use less complex encoder) as a result the most optomistic appraisal I've heard is that MPEG-4 with the ConvertX requires about half the bitrate of MPEG-2.

OK, to answer your question, basically, it can't be answered. You'll have to try different bitrates for yourself and see where the quality starts to drop off. For me, Best (3GB/hour) is what I use, since it gives me great recordings, but not huge diskspace. I've also seen that one of the DVD qualities (the 1.8GB/hour one DVD Long Play?) gives pretty good results.

Thanks for the info...

So would it be btest to encode it at a high setting using Sage and then take that file and re-encode it XVid/Divx to keep the high quality and get the file size down?

If so, what program would I want to use to do that? The main thing I want to do is record shows from TV at the best quality I can and then put those shows on DVD. But I obviously want to get as much on one DVD as I can...

[salsbst]

We record everything but sports on DVD Extra Long Long Play and rarely notice compression artifacts at 1776i (recorded via Svideo from digital cable).

[bartley9]

I uset Great(2GB per hour) and it looks the same as terestrial TV.

[kelemvor]

Originally Posted by bartley9

I uset Great(2GB per hour) and it looks the same as terestrial TV.

But at 2GB per hours, that's only 2 episodes of an hour long show per DVD which isn't what I'm looking for. I'm looking to get the most video on one DVD and still have it look good...

[Rogue9]

I used DVD Extended Play (which was about 1.8 gigs per hour) to record all 88 episodes of Farscape

By the time I got the commercials cut out, they were right at 1 gig a piece. So I put 4 episodes per DVD in file mode (just the raw mpg files). And I thought the quality looked pretty good on my 27" Standard Def TV.

I haven't got everything up and running on my big screen yet, so unfortunately, I can't comment on how they look on it...

[DAIBHI5]

Rogue, what software did you use to edit out the commercials?