[mythtv-users] Re: Channels with poor quality create HUGE

[Donavan Stanley]

On 4/15/05, Joe Votour <joevph at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Most digital cable channels are broadcast over some
> form of IP (Internet Protocol, not Intellectual
> Property :) ), and are broadcast as straight MPEG-2
> (or increasing in popularlty, MPEG-4) data.  Thus, the
> data is free of artifacts introduced by going over the
> analog wire (i.e. it's perfect), and as such can
> easily be re-compressed.  Even if you don't notice any
> noise in the picture of analog cable, rest assured, is
> is there, and it will affect the compression.

Except that's not how MPEG compression works.  Your bitrate determines
your file size not the amount of noise in the image.

Sounds like the OP is using software encoding and their machine is
having problems keeping up with the encoding and is dumping MPEG4 in
favor of mjpeg which is less CPU intensive.