XP Disk Compression Helps?

[joe123]

Hi.

I was wondering if turning Windows XP Disk Compression on on my dedicated disks for SageTV recordings would help or not?

Since MPEG2 files are already compressed, I was wondering if disk compression would make a significant difference or not in getting more disk space?

Anyone here using WindowsXP disk compression for recordings?

[waltraud]

Hi,

i do not use XP disk compression but I can tell you from experience (Backup software & hardware) that compressing an already compressed file is pointless. In worst case the file will get even larger then it was before.

Disk access will definitly be slower and the CPU utilization will go up because it will be busy perfoming the compression.

Don't do it. If you really need more space get a larger disk

[joe123]

Originally Posted by waltraud

Hi,

i do not use XP disk compression but I can tell you from experience (Backup software & hardware) that compressing an already compressed file is pointless. In worst case the file will get even larger then it was before.

Disk access will definitly be slower and the CPU utilization will go up because it will be busy perfoming the compression.

Don't do it. If you really need more space get a larger disk

Ok thanks. That is what I thougth but I wanted to see if anyone else had any real life experience using it.

[zz5]

The Hauppauge files actually do compress some. They surprisingly will compress around 7% which is huge given they're MPEG files. Try compressing one with a zip program and you'll see what I mean.

The reason they compress this much is that there is some empty header space. An alternative to compressing would be to run the file through an editor which will remove this extra header space.

You could try compressing with the Windows XP built-in file system compression but I would think that wouldn't work very well. It would be just too CPU instensive to handle the massive amounts of data of an MPEG file.

[aperry]

I don't think that stripping the empty header space would gain most folks anything, unless their hard drives are almost full and they have many recordings. Even still, you'd only pick up at most a few additional shows you'd be able to record (I would assume), so not really worth it, IMHO.

[gplasky]

Compressing will just add more processor overhead to your server and decrease its performance.

Gerry

[AboveUnrefined]

From experience -- if you have a good server running filesystem compression could help you out a lot because the system is just grabbing a stream off your PCI bus and copying them to disk. Bear in mind, however, that corruptions could happen a lot more easily within the filesystem (this is much more of a problem than CPU overhead) especially if the server is not rock solid.

[dbfresh23]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Compressing will just add more processor overhead to your server and decrease its performance.

Exactly!

Plus hard drives are so cheap these days it just wouldn't be worth it.

[dvd_maniac]

You could also convert the program easily with Xvid, recode or Divx if you plan to keep them for a while.
For example, Running a 3.2GB file through Nero Recode using Standard ASP at 700kbps leaves me with a file around 360MB, 270MB if I strip out the commercials first and takes about an hour on my P4 3.0ghz half that time using my AMD 4800+.
If you do not want to compress you could still strip out commercials and save about 25% that way.

[joe123]

Originally Posted by dvd_maniac

If you do not want to compress you could still strip out commercials and save about 25% that way.

Yeap! I sure would like to do that in an automated way, but I am not sure how to. I have VideoRedo which gets rid of commercials but lost on how to automated that.

[aperry]

I would not recommend doing any automated commercial removal. ShowAnalyzer, probably the best at commercial detection, can get you to about 95% or so success on finding the commercials and marking them so that SageTV can skip them. Now, there may be a program out there that could take what ShowAnalyzer finds and use SA's output to strip out the commercials and leave just the show, but again, I wouldn't recommend doing this without you actually checking the commercial breaks first...