(CAPTURING) what bitrate will guarantee best qaulity MPEG-2

[jamieuk]

Hi there!! the problem i am having is choosing a bitrate for a live event (ultimate fighting championship) i am going to record using my WINTV PVR 250.

I am not able to calculate a bitrate for the recording due to i havent got a clue how long it is going to be on 4, as the are six fights on the fight card......... And its like the old saying "how long is a peace of string".

If i had to guess i would say 3-4 hours max..... any tips on what i should do here, qaulity is my main concern b4 size of the event i am going to record, and even if i end up with a video that is 5.5 gig i will be cutting out all the fight build ups + adverts etc.. and only keeping all the main fights.

Will it be possible to produce the best qaulity possible with a high resolution, i.e 720x 480....... or is this asking to much here ???.

I will be burning to a dvd-r disk +++++ using MPEG-2 (dvd)

[bb]

You'll get best quality if you choose highest bitrate ;)
You have multiple options to edit your video later.
1. You can cut out what you don't need.
2. You can put the video on more than one DVD.
3. You can shrink the size of your (captured) source video, e.g. using ReJig or an MPEG-2 encoder like CCE, MainConcept MPEG Encoder, or TMPGEnc.

I wouldn't capture in MPEG-2 format, though. You can achieve better quality using Huffyuv or MJPEG (much bigger filesizes, though).

bb

[jamieuk]

what is the max bitrate i can use for dvd ?????

If you had to have a guess from your experience encoding with MPEG-2 what would you guess my final file size would be 9gig etc for around 3 hours?????.

will i all so be able to make resolution 720x480 doing this ??????

and most inportantly what the hell is Huffyuv ?? do dvd player support it ?? i have the kiss dp-450 divx player

[gotaserena]

The max bitrate for a DVD-compliant MPEG-2 video stream is 9000 kbps. The PVR-250 allows for a maximum of 12000 kbps.

Here (http://www.shspvr.com/reviews/pvr2_250/testing.html) you will find a list of the recording modes for the PVR-250 and sizes of 1-min clips (multiply it by 180 and you will have the size for 3h :p)

According to the table above 3h at DVD "standard play" (about 6500 kbps) will go a little above 9 GB of video. That should fit in 2 DVDs if you can play DVDs with more than 4 GB of data.

Be sure to use a good MPEG-2 editor like MPEG-VCR to cut out the commercials.

[jamieuk]

9GB that is very large video ...... is divx not close to the qaulity i will make with MPEG-2 ??? couldnt i use that ??

[gotaserena]

sure, with the right settings you will be able to record about 4h of mpeg-4 video into a dvd+-r with acceptable quality. But it will take about a full day of processing.