V6 Quality Conversion Questoin

[joe123]

I recently upgraded to SageTV V6 and am trying out the SageTV conversion option.

I record all my shows at Great quality 2.0GB/hr with my WinTV-PVR-150 and display the shows on my MediaMVP. The quality is fantastic.

I just converted one Mpeg2 recording to AVI (MPEG4) and it looks bad. I coverted the recording to AVI "High Quality with Deinterlace".

When the converted files plays on on MVP, it looks pretty bad. I have enabled SageTV options to show MPV at best option and I have a fairly fast computer, yet, I see lots of pixilation (sp?) on the MVP playback. The MVP is hard wired.

Is this normal, or do I need some other better codec software or etc?

I am trying to get the same quality playback with AVI files as I do with my current Mpeg2 playback.

[nielm]

Originally Posted by joe123

I just converted one Mpeg2 recording to AVI (MPEG4) and it looks bad. I coverted the recording to AVI "High Quality with Deinterlace".

MVP's can only play MPEG2, to cope with this, Sage internally converts MPEG-4/AVI into mpeg2 on playback, so what you are doing is:

Conversion: MPEG2 -> MPEG4/AVI (lossy)
Playback: MPEG4 -> MPEG2 (lossy)

In addition the MVP generates interlaced output, and the MPEG4 is not interlaced, so the deinterlacing/re-interlacing may introduce more noise, or blurryness...

(compressing without interlacing may make it even worse!)

[joe123]

Originally Posted by nielm

Conversion: MPEG2 -> MPEG4/AVI (lossy)
Playback: MPEG4 -> MPEG2 (lossy)

Yes, I understand that MediaMVP cannot play MPEG4(AVI), thus the computer has to covert AVI movies back to MPEG2 to display on the MVP.

Reading other entries on this forum, I thought that people were getting very good results with AVI playback on their MVPs, maybe I mis-read?

So is there a way to reduce disk space while preserving the picture quality to play back on the MVP's?

[FidgetyRat]

Not really without recording at a lower quality


I was in your same boat. I just sucked it in and purchased bigger hard disks. They are getting pretty damn cheap these days anyway.

You can probably get a terabyte for < 400.00


For me with 3 tuners, 160gb was plenty.

[joe123]

Originally Posted by FidgetyRat

Not really without recording at a lower quality

I was in your same boat. I just sucked it in and purchased bigger hard disks. They are getting pretty damn cheap these days anyway.

You can probably get a terabyte for < 400.00

I have 1.5TB on 6 large drives. If you know where I can buy 1TB for < 400 bucks, please let us know Every time I throw another 500GB disk on my PVR, it get's sucked up fast with more recordings.

Ok, so the going knowledge here is that converting from MPEG2 to MPEG4(AVI) will degrade movie quality even if you select High Quality in SageTV V6 convert?

I am asking because I don't see too many entries here saying that.

EDIT: Never mind on the 1TB for < $400 - I was thinking Raided 1TB for under 400 bucks.