Sage Quality Settings and Hardware Encoding

[mike1961]

Hello - I'm still a little confused about something. If I have the Hauppauge WinTV 500 cards which have hardware encoding, then I'm wondering if the Sage Quality settings tell the WinTV 500 card what quality mode to use when encoding? That's what I'm confused about because when I change the quality settings in Sage, the filesize is definitely different so I'm wondering if Sage tells the WinTV card what quality to encode the file with it's hardware encoder?

Thanks,
Mike

[Opus4]

Yes, that is the purpose of being able to choose the recording quality setting in SageTV.

BTW: It is only for something like HD where the recording quality setting is not used, since HD just saves the digital video stream to the disk w/o having to encode it. (HD is already encoded; Analog TV has to be encoded.)

- Andy

[mike1961]

I guess where I was confused is if one has a tuner card without hardware encoding then Sage has to do all the work of encoding (which obviously takes a lot of CPU cycles).

What I want to be sure of is when the recording quality is chosen in Sage, Sage knows to let the hardware encoder do the encoding at the chosen quality. I guess where I'm a little confused is if there are situations where some hardware encoders may not have the ability to encode in certain quality modes that Sage offers, then what happens?

Thanks again,
Mike

[Opus4]

If the overall default quality setting is not available on some tuner (& the tuner doesn't have its own default setting), the tuner would probably just end up using the settings the card was last configured to use, whatever that may be.

- Andy