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  1. Member
    Join Date
    Jul 2006
    Location
    United States
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    I recently bought a Hauppauge PVR-150MCE card (and Beyond TV 4 as part of a package from SnapStream.) After much struggle, I finally got the card and the WinTV2000 working properly. I hooked it up to my Dish Network DVR and I was ready to capture. I found using both Beyond TV 4 with default settings and WinTV2000 set at Standard Play DVD produced huge MPEG-2 files, and I could not fit 2 hours onto a DVD (1 hour of video was about 3 gig in size.) Using the Long Play DVD setting, I was able to fit 2 hours onto a DVD. but it uses VBR only up to 4800.

    Should I use custom capture settings for Dish Network/DBS video that will give me better quality and fit 2 hours onto a DVD? I read in the forums some advocate capping at a very high bitrate, and then compressing it down later via software rather than the VBR used in the hardware. If that is the best plan, which settings should I use, and which software to compress later?

    Thanks for any help! I apologize if asked before but I couldn't find this posted previously.
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  2. If you want to try capturing at a high bitrate and reencode down to a DVD compatible bitrate, create a custom template with 15,000 kbps CBR. That's as high as the card will go. Or you can use the predefined 12.000 kbps CBR template

    But reencoding to MPEG will introduce a second round of MPEG compression artifacts so your final result may not look better than using the Long Play template (4800 kbps average, 6000 kbps peak).

    One exception is if you can inverse telecine. Reducing the frame rate from 29.97 to 23.976 gives the encoder more bits per frame.

    Another exception might be when recording material that's not exactly 1 hour or 2 hours long. You could then use an exact bitrate and a 2-pass software encode to maintain a little more quality. I don't know about the PVR-150, but my PVR-250 consistently overshoots the specified average bitrate in VBR mode.
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