HDTV File sizes are HUGE!

[AzJazz]

I set my Recording Quality to "Good" (1.4 GB/hr), but my files are still about 4-6 GB / hr.

Am I missing something?

[CollinR]

Digital streams are you get what they give, you cannot adjust the quality there. If you want a filesize reduction you will need to transcode to another format. Read up about "Convert" and " Video Conversions" the resulting file will be whatever you specify it to convert to.

[GKusnick]

Recording Quality settings are for analog TV only, since that needs to be digitized before recording. HD programs are already digitized by the broadcaster; Sage just saves the bit stream to disk without re-encoding. So whatever bit rate the show is broadcast in, that's the bit rate you get. 6-8 GB/hr is typical for 720p or 1080i broadcasts.

[AzJazz]

Originally Posted by CollinR

Digital streams are you get what they give, you cannot adjust the quality there. If you want a filesize reduction you will need to transcode to another format. Read up about "Convert" and " Video Conversions" the resulting file will be whatever you specify it to convert to.

Thanks, guys!

I was wondering what the "transcoding" threads were about. I'll check into it ...

[paulbeers]

Hehe, this is exactly why most of us doing HD television have 500GB+ for TV recording space (I have 2 x 320GB drives). Most of my 1080i recordings are 9GB per hour which even at 640GB (595GB of true storage space) of storage is only about 66 hours of HD.

[mike1961]

I'm curious as to what kind of a setup you have for HD? Is it strictly OTA?

Thanks,
Mike

[AzJazz]

Originally Posted by mike1961

I'm curious as to what kind of a setup you have for HD? Is it strictly OTA?

Thanks,
Mike

Mike - I used to use OTA, but now I'm using cable QAM channels. Are OTA channel bitstreams smaller?

[Lucas]

Keep in mind that lower bit rates equal lower video quality.

So you should be "happy" that you get higher quality albeit with larger file sizes.....

[CollinR]

ATSC and QAM are both MPEG2 which is not the best for storage but is easier to modify and widely supported as it's whats on DVDs.

You can't compare bitrates for MPEG2 against MPEG4 variants as you get more for less with MPEG4.

[AzJazz]

Now that I've fooled around with transcoding, I have a new question:

Is there a setting in SageTV 6.3.x to automatically compress & delete the original video after (or while) it is recording?

[CollinR]

SJQ and AutoCompress Favorites both can do this.

I haven't tried SJQ yet but it's on my list, AutoCompress works fine but only on favorites. Both should support multiple transcodes so you can MPEG2>xvid and MPEG2>psp or whatever before you delete the original. SJQ seems to have more funtionality in one package that I had in the past created through multiple packages.