[mythtv-users] New User System Setup Questions

Bruce Markey bjm at lvcm.com
Thu Feb 20 09:43:41 UTC 2003


Cedar McKay wrote:

> Many people record at 640x480 which outshines even Tivo's "Best 
> Quality". I personally use 480x480, 3300 kbps (scaled) and mpg4 quality 
> setting of 2-12. I couldn't personally tell this apart from 640x480, but 
> maybe my tv isn't good enough (though it looks great to me!).

Cedar, your TV and eyes are fine ;-). It's broadcast TV
that isn't so good. Decades of engineering have gone into
making all sorts of problems acceptable to a certain
tolerance. The result is that we are all fooled into thinking
that the signal must be good and would look better with a
better TV. It won't!

640x480 sounds like it should be better than 544x480 but if
you recorded broadcast TV and did a side by side test it
would be hard to tell which was which. However, if you had
a very clean source like a digital channel from a digital
cable box over s-video or a DVD player over s-video, then
you would see a difference at higher capture resolutions.

I've always assumed that the commercial products limit
themselves to lower resolutions because higher resolution
eats more disk space for little, if any, visible difference.
Recording capacity is the ONLY issue for model number/price
of commercial products. Yet, on the MythTV lists, this is
one of the few threads in months that even mentions disk
space efficiency.

--  bjm




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