[mythtv-users] Very Basic Question

[Nick Rosier]

On 08/09/05, Mike Daugird <MDaugird at erdman.com> wrote:
> I have MythTV now recording and I can watch TV!
> I may have broken some more advanced features in my attempts to get the basics working.
> 
> 
> I have a PVR-350
> I want to record the TV shows in DVD format so that I can just burn them to disk using K3B
> Can someone talk down to me on how to setup the default quality, resolution and basically get
> everything straight?
> right now I am getting 640X480 I think and it takes about 2 gigs for a 30 minute show.
> I also want to know, on a P3 933mhz machine how long does commercial removal take? how do I know when
> it is done?

If you want DVD-format recordings, why do you record in a non-standard
DVD-resolution. Standard DVD-resolution are e.g. 720x480 for NTSC and
720x576 for PAL.
2G for 30 minutes seems a bit overkill. I get about 2G per hour and
that's nice quality. I doubt your cable company sends out an analog
signal that's the equivalent of 8Mbit/s digital so I'd lower that. Do
some testing with different bitrate settings.

As for commercial detection. Either someone would need to setup a
small database where for each type of CPU the time to commercial-flag
a 30 minute recording takes or you'll have to hope someone is using
the same CPU as you are. Again, do a test yourself.

> I would rather have a higher quality recording and buy another hard drive, but I don't want to have
> a bit rate that is way to high. My concern is really getting High quality recordings to put on DVD
> I am going to get my wedding, my daughters birth, and a few other VHS tapes into this box and
> I want them to be able to play on anybody's set top DVD player(mom, and mother-in-law)
> 
> thanks

VHS-recordings have an even lower resolution than TV so you can up the
bitrate all you want, it won't make it look any better.