[mythtv-users] What's your recording file size?

[MythTV]

>> As mentioned it is normal. You can adjust the data rate in the 
>> recording profiles. If you are recording analog from the air, then you 
>> might reduce the horizontal resolution from 720 pixels to 400 and 
>> reduce the datarate accordingly.
>> And you can transcode to MPEG4 to reduce the data rate even further. 
>> But in that case you should better have a high rate in the
>> MPEG2 to achieve a better MPEG4 result.

> Yeah, but I'm pretty sure the PVR-500 outputs MPEG-2, not MPEG-4, so this
kind of defeats the purpose of owning the PVR-500 (assuming 
> he purchased it with the MPEG-2 output in mind). Wouldn't it actually put
*more* stress on the system to transcode the output from a 
> PVR-500 card to MPEG-4 since the system has to decode the MPEG-2 stream in
addition to encoding the MPEG-4 stream?
>
The encode to MPEG-2 happens on the card in real-time with no CPU impact.
The encoding from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 happens non-real-time (like commercial
flagging) after the recording so it is CPU intensive, but can be run "nice"
so it doesn't impact other processes.