Hauppauge HD PVR 1212 best settings?

[nucklhead24]

I have looked for this everywhere and Im lost, I need a little guidedeance please, I just purchased a used HD PVR, it is working great and I have made 2 recordings, quality is amazing but a 2 Hr game is giving me almost an 8GB game, I am using the best or higuest quality settings of course and although I can easily burn a file that big using Dual Layer Discs I wish I could get a bit smaller size files, I have tried both .TS on WinTv and MP4 capturing using Arcsoft Showbiz, I get almost the same output, very large size files.

Can anyone here recommend the best settings without losing noticeable quality for an average of 2 Hrs. recording time?

the smaller the file size will also allow me to fit for example a 2 to 3 Hr. soccer game with OT and penalty kicks in a DL disc or at least that is my goal. Thanks in advance!

[jagabo]

TS and MP4 are containers. The audio and video they contain are the same. TS has more overhead -- about 5 percent. It's the bitrate of the audio and video that determine the quality and file size, not what container they are in. Use a bitrate calculator to determine what bitrate you need to use to fill a disc for a particular running time. Of course, with something like a soccer game you can't know exactly how long the game will run. So you have to go with the worst case scenario.

I seem to recall that WinTV delivers lower average bitrates than expected when recording in VBR mode. You may want to compensate for that.

[vhelp]

your question is not clear enough. are you capturing sports games from cable/satalite broadcast or home video ?

if these are braodcast games, then your quality will vary, and the bitrate you determine is your call. i would start with the hdpvr's default of 5Mbps. that's what mine was originally set to when i first installed it. 9Mbps if you want better quality, and 13.5Mbps if you want the maximum the unit can do. at 5Mbps will get you aprox 1.2gig/per 1/2hr. but sports is motion messy and noisy, and quality will vary from station to station airing the game, so higher bitrate will probably be better.

[nucklhead24]

Thank you both for your responses, I am still not very familiar with the settings or the options for example VBR mode, Overlay, etc. etc. Not sure if those settings make any difference, I have not touched anything I do not know about yet so almost everything is set to default except what I do understand which is the bitrate, constant VS variable etc.

Vhelp: I am capturing from TWC, I have an HD/DVR box and not sure if it makes a difference but one of the settings I can change in the HD box is the HD output, I currently have it set to 720p but it also has an option to output to 1080, 480, auto, etc. Would this make a difference in the capturing file size or quality? what do you recommend?

Most soccer games I capture are already recorded in my HD/DVR so the bitrate calculator will help! I see you suggested 5, I have read where others recommend 6 and others nothing lower than 8, I guess its trial and error and I will keep testing it out, I really wish I could find a tutorial or guide that would explain more in depth all of the setting options within the program, specially WinTv V7 which is what I am using along with Showbiz which seems more user friendly.

A friend of mine suggested I capture in the best quality possible and then compress it using Handbrake, I tried and it yielded almost no difference in quality which is good, It didnt seem to like quality was loss but it also did not make much difference in the size overall.

[jagabo]

Most soccer games I capture are already recorded in my HD/DVR so the bitrate calculator will help! I see you suggested 5, I have read where others recommend 6 and others nothing lower than 8, I guess its trial and error and I will keep testing it out

Different material requires different bitrates. A 2 hour still video of a bowl of fruit could be captured with less than 1 Mb/s. High action, film grain, smoke, haze, fire, water, flickering lights, (basically anything that causes successive frames to be different), requires more bitrate.