[MPlayer-users] Re: Which TV card ?

[Rainer Hantsch]

Hello,
and thanks a lot for your kindly answers. I see, this is not very trivial and
can get very tricky, because the target hardware I plan to use (PIII-800,
256MB, 20GB HDD - which could be extended by a 2nd HDD) can easily be
overloaded.

So I _must_ use some kind of compression which has to be done on the fly
before writing to harddisc, otherwise my hardware will not be able to handle
this.
I have heared that the CPU load increases heavily with the strength of
compression - the smaller the final file size, the more CPU load is arising by
still getting poor quality because of the extreme compression. Also, I have
heared that it is no good choice to convert multiple times between different
formats, because every compression algorithm reduces the quality again and
again.

When converting DVD -> DivX4, I usually choose a video bitrate of ~2100kbps,
which gives excellent video quality with no visible limitations. Let's use
this as "high quality" definition instead of a true raw-stream recording
(which is surely much better).
A normal movie needs at the above data rate approx. 700MB/42min, a very
good value, but I am afraid that
a.) my 800MHz PIII will not be strong enough for on-the-fly compression in
    this dimension (I get ~8fps from VOB -> DivX with transcode, doing
    re-scaling, clipping, sound conversion, etc. in parallel). But because
    I do not have to re-scale, clip, ... the video, only compress, it can
    possibly be much better here.
b.) DivX will not allow me to cut out commercials because it is not really
    supported by most video editors on Linux, knows the hell, why... :-/

So I will have to look for something different, which does only very slight
compression to keep most of the quality, but still strong enough to get 2-3
hours onto 15GB HDD space - in a file format which can be edited afterwards.

What will give "best" results? I would prefer to keep full PAL resolution as
long as possible.

mfg

  Ing. Rainer Hantsch