Shoutbox

I have just today bought a tv tuner card for my laptop. It is made by AVerMedia and supports HDTV as well. I have been fiddling with it and have got my tv stations programmed in and it works great and im really happy with the picture quality etc (especially on HD channels). However i just tried recording some tv to see how easy it was and recorded a minute of digital tv. I then went to where it saved and the filesize is ~70mb for one minute of video. It is set to record as MPEG II and for digital there is no other option besides record audio only (for analog tv there is avi, mpeg I, DVD etc).
So my question is surely there is a way of reducing the filesize. I see many capped high definition tv shows for download on the internet and a 1hr episode is around 350mb yet at the moment if i was to record a one hour episode it would create a file around 4200mb. Which is definately going to fill my harddrive pretty quick no matter which one i put it on. I bought this thing as a replacement to my crappy old vcr recording but am questioning its usability.
Can anyone who has used one of these type of things before offer any advice on operating it better and maybe adjusting some settings?
Thanks

it's probably a good idea to try compressing it? google for something to compress video files

Download WinDVR(trial version) its great . Or get Windows XP Media Center Edision .

Add me @ MSN/WLM(profile for id) for some more information about this topic

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Originally posted by kao
it's probably a good idea to try compressing it? google for something to compress video files

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Thats of no help. How can one compress viedo while recording it?

Edit2 : The normal size is around 18-20 mb/min.

Edit3 : Visit http://www.avermedia.com/ for drivers.

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Originally posted by -!Felu!-
Edit :

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Originally posted by kao
it's probably a good idea to try compressing it? google for something to compress video files

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Thats of no help. How can one compress viedo while recording it?

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It is of big help actually as that's the whole point.

1) Either select a high compression level before recording. Reduce the captured size in pixels, etc... (see your capture software for the available options)

2) Or capture in highest quality and compress the file later. This is the most prefereable method as you could edit the video without quality loss (eg: strip down to the only needed frames) and compress it later.

I have thought about just converting/compressing it after but that seems like a lot of effort to go to especially if i was going to set it to record each episode of a tv show every week. If I was then to have to convert each episode from a ~4gb file down to avi (or whatever) it could take a long time and also take up a fair bit of disk space.
I was hoping to be able to adjust quality/compression settings before recording (cookie's 1st point) so that i could eliminate having to do this, however in the software that is provided with the card (AVerTV) the setup for recording digital tv is merely MPEG II format with no adjustment settings.
Is it possible for me to use another capture program with the tv card i have just bought? I am having a look at the program '-!Felu!-' suggested, does anyone know of any others (possibly free alternatives considering i just paid $AU 145 for the card ??). I would rather not install Windows MCE and from what i have read this is not necessary just to record and watch tv.
Thanks for the time and help so far guys

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Originally posted by Dan0208
Is it possible for me to use another capture program with the tv card i have just bought?

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The gold standard for that, which everybody loves, is BeyondTV by SnapStream. 

However, note that your ability to record to different formats on the fly may be limited by the (lack of) hardware compression in your TV tuner card.

set ur record to AVI (i had the same prob with  USB TV adapter)

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Originally posted by ImpuLse
set ur record to AVI (i had the same prob with  USB TV adapter)

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Originally posted by Dan0208
It is set to record as MPEG II and for digital there is no other option besides record audio only (for analog tv there is avi, mpeg I, DVD etc).

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Originally posted by Dan0208
I see many capped high definition tv shows for download on the internet and a 1hr episode is around 350mb

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Many TV episodes on the internet are tagged as being HDTV, but they are really not HDTV. They are just from a HDTV source, and have been downscaled and recompressed.

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Originally posted by Dan0208
if i was to record a one hour episode it would create a file around 4200mb.

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You can expect that and even higher for real HDTV OTA, but if you renecode those files after you have recorded them, you should be able get them down to one or two CDs still keeping decent quality in HD.

I'm sorry, I dont know of how this could be done, but I hear that Virtualdub is very good. It's often used with Avisynth (lets many programs open files that aren't AVI thinking that they are uncompressed AVI). XviD and x264 are good codecs. x264 gives better quality than XviD at equal bitrates, but x264 takes an enormous amount of CPU power (for decode I know, for encode I assume), If you have a powerful system, this mightn't be a problem, but if you take HD x264 to a friends computer, it might not play.

If you record five shows one day, it should take about 20 GiB (from what you've stated). The next day, you can recompress those episodes, and fit them all onto one or two DVDs (depends on the size you choose), and delete the originals.