a question about encoding mpeg2

[Chris27]

well I took a bunch of shows off my dish dvr and am now in the process of learning how to compress it. I have been using meGUI, and for the most part, it's been working great. I have run into a problem though, the avisyth scripter insists on resizing the video and sometimes it totally screws up the aspect ratio. Is there a reason it resizes the video to a smaller resolution? Wouldn't it be best if I kept the video at its original resolution minus what I crop from it?

[Pookie]

You might want to request that a mod move this question into the Megui section.

From a practical perspective, transcoding a HD res source to an HD res target is going to take forever, unless you have a render farm of computers (i'm guessing you a ViP211 HD Dish?). Timewise, it makes more sense to buy something like a Zensonic media player http://www.z500series.com/ or similar, and play back your original MPEG2 sources.

[Chris27]

it is just SDTV. I'm using a dish dvr 625 btw. I'm encoding it to h.264 to save space on my HDD, going from 1gb/hour to 250mb/hr

[mitsubishi]

MeGui doesn't insist on it, you can uncheck the tickbox next to resize or you can enter your own values. You'll have to resize if the source is anamorphic.

If the bitrate you are encoding to is too low then you will get a better quality output by resizing, its better to have a good quality lower resolution than a poor higher one.

[Chris27]

well in the avisynth scripter, when I demux the 640x480 mpeg file, it won't let me set a horizontal output resolution greater than 544. The only way I can get around that is to manually edit the script.