[mythtv-users] Optimal capture resolution for DVD burning

[John Drescher]

On 7/26/06, JCA <1.41421 at gmail.com> wrote:
>     I am currently capturing the video signal from my TV at a 720x480
> resolution. This resolution is set in two places; first, by means of
> the ivtvctl command on my WinTV PVR-150 board, and also in the
> mythfrontend configuration. This works fine. The only problem is that
> the resulting data occupies a lot of disk space: A three hour show
> takes up some 7 GB.
>
>     What I want to do is to capture material and then burn it to a
> DVD. I understand that capturing at 720x480 is overkill, for
> broadcasts in the US do not have that resolution. My question would
> therefore be, What capture resolution should I use, if I want to burn
> the resulting material to DVD to be watched on a 32" or larger TV,
> while keeping the best quality without wasting space? The ideal
> solution would be one that minimizes the processing of the captured
> material for burning to DVD - currently I only have to replex the MPEG
> files created by MythTV, in order to obtain output MPEG files that I
> can directly feed to dvdauthor for the creation of the DVD burning
> file hierarchy.

For over a year I recorded at the MythTV default of 480x480 because I
thought that matched the input signal the closest but I was unable to
view my recordings on one of my two dvd players and then when
MythArchive came along (and mythburn no longer worked) I had to change
this setting to 720x480 because at 480x480, MythArchive wanted to
resize my recordings to 720x480 and this took 3 times as long to
process. The thing is after I made this change to 720x480 my file
sizes are no larger than what they were at 480x480 ~2.2GB/hour. The
reason for this is you set the maximum bitrate and for both settings I
had the same high quality setting. I believe this setting (along with
the resolution) is in the recording profiles of mythtv.

John