mpeg-2 to mpeg-1

[nerys]

what is the difference between sage tv and sage recorder ? they sound like the same thing which is confusing ?

is there a page that explains what each is exactly and what the differences are ?

Chris Taylor
http://www.zodiacreview.com/

[Opus4]

FAQ: What is SageTV, etc.

- Andy

[mike1961]

DVD Maniac - (one question last paragraph) I am totally sold on the Nero AVC format...it's just great....I am taking all my DVD's and encoding them in this format at 250 mb per hour with fantastic quality. I can barely tell the difference between that and the original DVD on my monitor at 1024 x 768 resolution. In other words.....my computer is mad at me because I now have it working the graveyard shift while I sleep because it takes about 10 hours to encode a movie in that format (lol).

But, I also now have it working during the day and since Nero defaults to the Low priority mode I can still easily do other things while it's encoding so I'm now encoding two movies per day. Once I get another DVD in my other computer I'll have two computers working the graveyard shift.

What can I say but thank you for turning me on to this great format.

You see - once I have all my movies on a hard drive like you it is relatively quick and easy to make a backup (imagine losing all that effort)? One two hour movie in 500 megs with far better quaility than mpeg 1...totally amazing. Why bother with DVD's at all?....Tivo turned us to the idea of not needing or looking for VHS tapes anymore....your idea of Nero AVC format (along with Sage) turns me on to the idea of rarely needing a tape or DVD (except if you rent or buy a movie of course).

I'm now realizing that it takes only an additional 3 megs for subtitles in the AVC format so I'm including both English and Spanish subtitles since it takes so little extra space. I keep wondering if I should try encoding in either Cinema or HDTV. First, it's supposed to have higher resolution but I'm not sure if it will help much if at all because I don't think the DVD resolution even goes that high anyway. Any thoughts on that? Would you stick with the Standard AVC format and also I still don't understand what 2 reference frames means in the expert mode.

Mike

[mike1961]

DVD Maniac - almost forgot....with the AutoGK you said it takes about the same time as watching a movie to compress. I'm finding that it takes about 5 times as long to compress iwith Nero AVC. Are you compressing with xvid and not divx with the AutoGK and would you still say Nero is a lot better? I think you once said that something like it was about twice as good (ie: 200 megs in AVC is like 400 with AutoGK but I wasn't sure if that was the xvid format). I want the best quaility possible in the most compressed format so it seems like the AVC is the best. So long as it doesn't take the computer a lot of work to playback (which it doesn't appear to), since it's a one time thing AVC has won me over at this time. Why use the AutoGK? I'm not sure if Nero will compress an mpg or if it's just for dvd's. Your thoughts?

Thanks again,
Mike

[dvd_maniac]

Hey Mike.
I'll try to answer all.
First: You're welcome. I am probably the biggest user of AVC on this forum, but I did not create it and I'm probably not the first to use it. I think Korben Dallas might have been. So Props to Korben as well.
There is very little quality difference between Divx & Xvid. They are both mpeg-4 ASP as is the NON-AVC profiles in Nero Digital.
My personal opinion on using Cinema or HDTV is that unless you view on high end LCD or DLP screen and start with an HDTV signal, you will not see much improvement with a much higher filesize. I would think you could do better when doing DVD conversions in Standard AVC just by upping the bitrate, cutting out the credits, lowering audio bitrate (I use 40 for most movies).
As far as still using AutoGK? Up until recently I was still converting my DVD collection, so at least 2 of my PCs were CONSTANTLY chugging along, leaving one for TV show converting. So, I did not have time/CPU cycles to edit out the commercials and as I said in previous post, Nero Digital creates .mp4 files which are extremely hard to edit. So instead I used xvid(Avi) which are extremely easy to edit.
Now that my DVD collection is caught up and there are hardly any 1rst run shows on, and I have almost everyone of my oldie favorites done I have time/CPU cycles to edit out commercails first so now I am using AVC to encode everything.
AVC is fine for use with SageTV recorded mpeg files.
One note if you want to do this: Use a high bitrate when recording in Sage. This will lead to a better AVC compression.
Hope I got everything...

[mike1961]

One question though - I'm wondering where the "cut off" is when converting to AVC. In other words, I understand that one should have the best quality possible before converting to AVC format. But, I'm wondering where one no longer sees much difference from the original quaility recording. In other words, in a prior post I think you said you record at around 5.9 gb/hour in Sage (the highest possible). I'm wondering if there will be that big of a difference when compressing to the AVC format from a 2 gb/hour or 3.2 gb/hour or 5.9 gb/hour? I just can't see that there would be that much difference (if any at all) recording at 5.9 gb/hour instead of say 3.2 gb/hour or perhaps even 2 gb/hour. I haven't tested this yet but I'm hoping to have the server built within a few days and I can start using Sage all over the house. I'm also going to have to input over 50 frequencies in the registry because they are all coming in fuzzy (but that's in another post).

Thanks again,
Mike

[dvd_maniac]

In my experience, I find it to give better results compressing from the higher bitrate. When I view fast scenes with anything other then the Max setting, I sometimes get glitches and ghosting. Especailly when viewing sports stuff. I find that it takes almost exactly the same when compressing either recording quality size. So I find no reason to record in the lower format myself.
Like everything here, it is best for you to try each out yourself and come to your own conclusion. But try it on a couple different sources to be thourough.