[mythtv-users] RE:prv-250 capture settings and video quality

[Vinton Coffman]

Jason, thanks for answering my question. I plan to try it tonight.  Is 
there a formula or spec for choosing bitrate and peak bitrate?  Is peak 
always 2x the base bitrate?

 > > Can someone post their settings or the procedure necessary to reduce
 > > the bit rate. I was under the impression that people were getting
 > > about 2 GB/h with the pvr-250. Can anyone with a 250 card verify 
this.

 > Everyone that's mentioned the default bitrate of the wintv-pvr cards 
has said
 > it's set to VBR 8000 kbps (4GB/hour). You're the only one that's 
(wrongly)
 > said that they're 2GB/hour at the default bitrate.

 > There's stuff in the ivtv driver now to change the bitrate, but it's 
going to
 > be changing sometime so it's not really worthwhile to support it yet.
 >
 > Isaac

As for being the only one "wrongly" saying 2GB/hour, I read this before 
I started using the project when I was still spec'ing the hardware I 
wanted to buy.  It's from a HOW-TO draft that was being circulated on 
this list.  I didn't know that it didn't apply to the pvr-250 and I was 
asking for confirmation, not stating a fact.

 > 3.3.3 Hard Disk(s)
 >
 > Encoded video takes up a lot of hard disk space. The exact amount 
depends
 > on the encoding scheme, the size of the raw images, and the frames per
 > second, but a typical value for MythTV is 2 GB/hour. Allow enough 
space.

FWIW, the box the pvr-250 plainly states on the left end of the box
"Hardware MPEG-2 video and audio encoder, so you only need 1-2 
Gigabytes per hour of recorded video."

Moving on,  I want to thank Isaac and company for a great piece of 
software.

I just read an article on excite that future versions of ReplayTV will 
possibly lose their ability to automatically skip commercials.  This 
happens to be the major "Wow!" feature when I show people MythTV.

BTW, I would be willing to build, maintain, and  host a FAQ page 
compiling info on using the pvr-250 with MythTV.  Presently, it seems 
one has to dig through the list archives or cvs repository to find 
basic info.  I would like to give back to the project and thought this 
might be a useful source for people new to the project wanting to use 
this card.

Let me know if I should move forward with this idea.  It would need a 
link on the MythTV site to be useful.

Thanks,
Vinton