HDTV capture........mpeg compression...???

[SKT]

I hope someone can help me out here. I have a USB DHTV + Digital TV tuner for the PC. Its great and I am doing a little recording for watching at a sensible hour, due to the World Cup. I had a PCI unit and it's captured files would come to around 6 gig (mpg) and then could be compressed to about 500 meg via TMPGEnc with very little, if not any noticable loss of image quality.

But........

With the capture files of this new unit (MSI PC-TV Mega Sky 580), they come out at about 4 gig (mpg) for a 90 minute match. When I try do the exactly the same compression via TMPGEnc there is quite a noticable loss in image, which is a shame since it records such a quality image in the first place.

How can I get the quality image with some decent compression. The main use is for recording football games and documentaries and then putting them on DVD. At this rate, I could get 1 per DVD. With the old unit, I could possibly get around 6 or more per DVD.

Cheers for any help anyone can offer.

[Latexxx]

It's the content. Football is much more harder to compress than something else. And something like 500 mb is too little for anything in full resolution mpeg-2.

And about capture cards. They should all give you exactly what is being broadcast and thus the image quality is just the same using different cards.

IMHO. Something like two matches per dvd should be doable.

Ps. It is likely that this has nothing to do with HDTV as it is completely different thing as digital tv unless you're capturing BBC's HD test channel.

[Mshake]

I am guessing aound 1-1.4gb per match would be best for quality and size.
ps. i am also doing something similar and been experimenting with few different softwares/filters

[eb]

See 3 minutes sample (ftp://www.eb.enterpol.pl:eb@www.eb.enterpol.pl/nmnn.avi) as 40MB Xvid

EDIT:
Sample was done with simple 1-pass Xvid encoding acc. to below graph
picture (ftp://www.eb.enterpol.pl:eb@www.eb.enterpol.pl/wm2006.JPG)