MPEG 2 capture rate

[olyteddy]

I have a Hauppauge PVR USB2 card and am going to capture several 2 hr shows from VHS. The audio is all linear mono, video SP. Would CBR 8 Mb video with 320 Kb audio be a good capture rate? We may transcode to other formats (MPEG 4 variants, for smaller web files) so I want to retain as much quality as I can, and 4 Gb per hour seems a reasonable storage budget. Correct me if I'm wrong, but CBR should help keep A/V sync when transcoding.

[non-linear]

Would CBR 8 Mb video with 320 Kb audio be a good capture rate?

That should be fine. I would use those bitrates when I used my ATI AIW card, then reencoded for my final product.

[jman98]

I have a Hauppauge PVR-350 and I have used similar or slightly higher video bit rates for capturing old laserdiscs. Believe it or not, there are some laserdisc, especially of concerts, that have never been released on DVD. I use CCE to transcode to a lower bit rate and it works great. I think it's best to use CBR as if you're going to transcode anyway, there's not point in using VBR to save space.

[edsmith77]

olyteddy,
I have the exact same setup and I use 8Mb constant quality with audio at 384. For a two hour show and cutting out commercials I end up with an mpeg2 file size of around 4Gb. If you go to 2.5 hrs and after cutting the file size is betwee 4.5 and 5Gb. Shrink fixes this up with no problems.
The quality is outstanding.

Ed