HD recording quality

[wolfgang187]

How do I get it? The best I can select in sage 5.0 is mpeg 2 @6.0 gigs an hour. It looks ok, but how do I get the option to have it be around 8 gigs an hour?

[matt91]

I don't do HD Sage at this point, but isn't HD recording simply dumping the stream to disk? There is no conversion to alter to provide for better or worse recording.

Perhaps you really are having issues with playback? Post more details on your setup and what you're seeing, and perhaps someone can help you.

Matt

[wolfgang187]

Ok, I'm using Sagetv 5.0, and under the detailed setup where you set the recording quality of your tuners, I have no option to catpture in HD. I have DVD standard play (which is only like 3.2 gigs an hour), and i have an mpeg 2 option which is 5.9 gigs an hour. I want to know why I do not have an option to capture at say 8 gig an hour. I have a new core 2, geforce 8600, not sure of the OTA HD tuner card I have. Not having any playback issues at all, just wondering where the HD recording quality options are in sage.

[Opus4]

There are no HD recording qualities to select. As was mentioned above, HD recordings simply consist of saving the HD stream to the drive as it is received; there is no encoding of theHD stream happening on your PC. For an HD tuner, the analog recording quality choices have no effect.

- Andy

[wolfgang187]

So its up to my tuner to provide me these options. ok. I guess ill look for newer software for it, but its only a temperary tuner for me anyway

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by wolfgang187

So its up to my tuner to provide me these options.

Not really. The design of digital capture devices is to just capture the stream and record it to disk. There are no ways to set a capture rate for a digital stream, you just get what is sent to you OTA or from the Cable company. The reasoning is that if the stream is sent at 6gig/hour, then there is no point in saving it at 8gigs/hour, since isn't gonna make a better digital signal.

The only way you could record a digital stream at a different bitrate would be to have your digital tuner or Sage transcode on the fly. Not currently possible in consumer grade electronics.

[RobJ]

I'm not sure you understand the difference between analog and digital. If you do, I apologize, and please just ignore this. (The following is not intended to be technically accurate, but illustrative of the difference.)

Analog is sent to your tuner like a series of waves, and your capture card is essentially taking rapid hi-res, medium res, or lo-res pictures of those waves, compressing the pictures, and saving them to a disk file. Recording quality options are only for analog recordings, and instruct the capture card as to what picture quality is wanted. If you ask for high quality (DVD Standard), then the pictures are captured in hi-res, as if the card was capturing every ripple of the waves and the spray and the shades of color, which would obviously take a large file to store it all. If you only wanted a very low quality, the pictures might only capture the wave peaks and troughs and some proportion of their size; and this would be saved to a very small file.

Digital is as if those same waves were each bringing a box, and in each box a fixed piece, like a puzzle piece, and the capture card opens each box, fits the pieces together, and saves them to a file. Recording options do not apply, because what they send is what you get, whatever tuner you have.

Digital is like downloading a file on the Internet. If you ask for a specific file, you don't expect to see options on that file. You don't want half the file, or 2 times the file, or 90% of the file, you want to download the exact file size of that file. The same is true of any digital channel. The provider decides the quality of that channel, and then encodes it at a fixed size that is sent to you. You save what the provider sends.

As far as I know, HD is always sent as a digital recording. SD recordings can be sent as analog or digital, but the recording options only apply to analog SD recordings.

It IS possible to have a choice of HD recording quality, but only under special circumstances. If you had both an OTA provider of HD channels and a cable provider of HD, then probably an HD show on a OTA channel would be a higher bitrate and better quality picture than the same HD show on a cable channel. Therefore, you have the choice of either the better quality recording (larger file) on the OTA channel, or the smaller file (poorer picture) on the cable channel.