[mythtv-users] MPEG4 bigger than MPEG2?

[Ross Boylan]

Hi, everyone.  I'm a new user, and am wondering why transcoding is
making my files bigger.  More specifically, I think I have transcoded a
file from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4, and it got a little bigger (3.1 vs 2.9GB).

The original file was around 2.9G; this was a .mpg file created from an
HDHomeRun device; my understanding is that this means the file is MPEG-2
format.

I requested a transcode by typing X; the resulting .nuv file was 9.2G.
My transcode for "Autodetect from MPEG2" was set for RTjpeg; I reset it
to MPEG4.  I think I reset the "Autodetect for RTJpeg" to MPEG-4 (maybe
it was that way to begin with.

I transcoded again and the resulting file was 3.1G.

I think that file is MPEG4, and I think MPEG4 is more compact than
MPEG2.  So how come it isn't?

I'm running mythtv 0.24.2-0.1 from Christian Marillat on a Debian
testing chroot

Thanks.
Ross