[mythtv-users] Is there a good guide on recording profiles somewhere?

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 01:52:06AM -0400, Michael T. Dean wrote:
> On 08/29/2004 02:03 PM, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> >I'll second this.  We're pretty happy with our Default, but less so
> >with our Low Quality... and some suggestions on good mpeg2->4
> >transcoding parameters would be nice too.
> >
> >I've put up a couple of pages at MythTV.info that people can post their
> >parameters and comments on; they're underneath
> >
> >http://www.mythtv.info/moin.cgi/UserManual_2fTechnicalDetailsAppendix
> >
> >It's pretty much a copy and paste kind of thing.
> >
> >All contributions welcome.  :-)
>
> Haven't yet set up an account on the wiki, so I'm posting here.

Note that you can edit the wiki even if you *haven't* registered yet,
though we encourage you to do so.

> I've noticed a lot of people using high bitrates with the PVR-x50's, but 
> I'm using a pretty low bitrate and getting what I consider to be 
> excellent results.  I will admit that I'm coming from about 5 years of 
> having only watched TV after recording everything to VHS in EP mode, so 
> I'm not the best judge of quality (anything beats an EP VHS recording 
> :).  Also, I have a satellite signal piped to the PVR-350 via S-Video 
> (but I'm using nVidia GF4MX440 for output for OpenGL and Xv support), so 
> signal noise/bad signal quality aren't a problem.

I know what you mean.  

> Anyway, I was wondering what someone with a discriminating eye might 
> think of my settings.  I'm using a bitrate of 2200 and max bitrate of 
> 9800 and it seems to give me the best of both worlds--small files and 
> good quality.  I'm averaging about 1 1/4 GB/hr.  I've heard that having 
> a large range of bitrates tends to stress the encoder, but I got 50 
> episodes and 174 hours of Olympics without problems.  Also, I'm using 
> 640x480, but I can't tell a difference in quality between 480x480, 
> 640x480, and 720x480.  I might be switching to 720x480 to make DVD 
> authoring easier, but...

Wow.  I'll have to plug that in for comparison, but we're averaging
2.2GB/hr, which is clearly high.  It may be the large differential that
makes the card's job easier, we'll have to try that.

> Also, I'm wondering if the poor quality people have mentioned is 
> actually noticeable on the TV or only when transcoding for/playing back 
> on a computer (or other progressive display).

I can spot MPEG artifacting on direct un-transcoded playback, myself.

> BTW, at the bottom is a nice little query that can summarize your 
> recording profile information in a compact cross-tab format.  I'm 
> posting my data in the standard tabular format because the long-lines of 
> the cross-tab don't go well with  text-based mail readers...  (Oh, and 
> you should probably stretch your terminal window when running the query.)

*Very* cool; thanks.  I'm going to toss that into a script.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	"You know: I'm a fan of photosynthesis as much as the next guy,
	but if God merely wanted us to smell the flowers, he wouldn't 
	have invented a 3GHz microprocessor and a 3D graphics board."
					-- Luke Girardi