TV Tuner converting

[Dark Lotus]

I use a TV Wonder Card I got at Best Buy for like $50 to record TV Shows on my hard drive. However, they come out massive. For example, one 2-hour episode of WWE Raw is over 1.2 GB of space. The Pilot episode of The Dave Chapelle Show, 17 minutes with commercials cut out, is 174Mb.

Meanwhile, ShareReactor puts out 45-minute episodes of 24 that weigh in at under 500Mb apiece.

My TV Wonder card captures the video in MPG at 352x240 (i think that's the right numbers, but that's about the size) and the audio at 44KHz 16 Bit Stereo.

How can I convert what I've got into compressed video formats so the file sizes are shrunk?

Thanks guys.

[lineber]

Those settings seem about right for VCD quality. You can lower your Video bitrate and your Audio bitrate for smaller files for personal viewing. A standard VCD has a Video bitrate of 1150 kbit/s and an Audio bitrate of 224 kbit/s. This is roughly about 10 MB/min; so a 17 minute show should be around 170 MB (roughly); which is what you have.

I use the AverTV studio TV tuner, which is in a similar catagory and price range as the TV Wonder Card. I am able to customize my recording settings; which I have done for shows that I will not be recording to CD-R or DVD. So, I record some shows in low quality to save space on my HD. I have used about 800 kbit/s video and 128 kbit/s audio, to save space for shows I will delete after I have watched them. This quality reminds me of extended play vcrs, where I would squeeze 6 hours on one VCR tape. I have done similar things to get 2 hours on one VCD.

Hope this helps!

[daesdaemar]

Those file sizes seem appropriate. If you want to maintain quality of your video and have as small a file as possible, I would consider something like VirtualDub, and capture with compression.