[mythtv-users] PVR-150 built-in encoder vs transcoding

[Rich West]

I've got a PVR-150 which, as you all probably know, does the MPEG2 
compression and audio encoding all on the fly.  I tweaked the settings 
for the encoder so as to give me pretty good SD video.  I know that 
there are limitations since my DirecTV service is technically getting 
MPEG2 data to the set-top-box, which decodes it and send it out to the 
PVR-150 which is re-encoding it.

However, I was doing some tests with the pdatranscode script and found 
that I can take the video that was recorded via the PVR-150 and 
re-encode it via mpeg4 (keeping the aspect ratio and audio sampling rate 
the same) and I can get similar quality (I've only been testing with a 
CRT).  Of course, it took time to actually re-encode it.

The result was the test mpeg4 file was 1/4 the size of the mpeg4 file.

So, I ask.. aside from the performance of watching livetv, does it make 
sense to transcode everything to mpeg4 in order to save on disk space 
(no, I'm not one of those that has 2TB of space here at home.  Right 
now, it's just ~600GB)?

-Rich