I'm experimenting with the transcoding my over the air HDTV recordings to mpeg-4 to save hard drive space. I enabled transcoding but didn't change any of the default bitrate values. I did enable the "scale bitrate according to capture resolution" option. I am recording OTA HDTV with a HDhomerun unit. Here are my results from the first show I transcoded:
<br><br>Channel: CBS<br>Title: Racheal Ray<br>Original size: 6.8GB<br>Transcoded size: 6.3GB<br><br>Does this look like usual space savings from transcoding? Half a gig is a lot, but honestly I was expecting more. It saved less then
7.5% of the original file size. Basically if I transcode everything I can have 107 hours of recordings on a given hard drive size instead of 100 hours. I think it would be better to save the cost of the electricity used to transcode and buy a larger hard drive.
<br><br>I didn't cut the commercials. I know that would have saved more space, but I am not interested in archiving shows. I just watch once and then delete. And I don't trust the commercial flagging enough to cut without manually checking the cuts first.
<br><br>Am I missing something? Do I need to adjust some bitrate settings to get better compression?<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>_____________<br>Ryan Patterson