Conversion quality levels

[garyellis]

any rules of thumb for conversion quality levels?

I have most of my television programs saved without commercials. I recorded them at the "Best" setting. What would be the equivalent MPG4 setting to get compariable quality?


I converted 1 from "best" to MPEG4- AVI - High Quality and it looks to be as good quality as the "original"...and its about 1/2 the space...

any sugggestions?

Also, now that its an AVI file and being transcoded (I guess)..My FF and Rev buttons don't seem to work on my MVP.

Thanks,

Gary

[blade]

I created my own profiles to use and they are posted here if you want to take a look. I don't know if anyone else has tried them, but they work well for me. Well I should say some some shows look almost as good as the originals to me and others don't. I think a lot of the difference I see is between the Nvidia Decoder being used on the original and whatever deinterlacing Sage is using during transcoding. For some shows the difference between the two is much greater than others. A full 1 hour 4x3 show with commercials is typically around 930MB and a 4x3 Letterboxed ends up at roughly 740MB

If I were you I'd at least add cropping. For example many recordings will have noise, artifacts, or black bars around the edges. Removing those can help and if you have letterboxed shows you can crop a lot so that you're not wasting bitrate on black space above and below the actual video.