Increasing Recording Quality for "Best" - (5.8GB/hr is less than half standard HDV!!)

[JetreL]

Originally Posted by crobs808

Bummer...I think this is just an issue for me since I have worked in the industry for so long...I can tell minor quality differences and they really bug me

That is so why I am not an:

• Astronomer - I love to look at the sky and marvel at just how beautiful it is
• Architect - Buildings are great city scape are great but I would hate them if I analyzed every room I walked into
• Video Engineer - Wow that picture looks great. I am thankful I can find a product that records in much better than standard TV and not have to over analyze the images it displays.

[sandor]

Originally Posted by crobs808

Bummer...I think this is just an issue for me since I have worked in the industry for so long...I can tell minor quality differences and they really bug me, esepcially when I have other hardware than can go up to 100Mbps, capturing over firewire, and this device is so limited...The technology is out there, but there is nothing better than the HD-PVR for us to use? Bummer.

thanks for all the input, and yes, of course I watched the recordings in the same program, and even side by side in VLC...still not good quality compared to the TME recording.

-C

so hook up your panny HD video camera to your STB and record your tv that way.

oh wait, content providers dont allow that. truthfully, we are lucky the analog loophole is still there.

[ytulpan]

I have DVB-S2 tuners and also HD-PVR's so I can compare the quality of exact bit stream recordings vs STB+HD-PVR

The average bit rate of the HD programming here is around 8.5 to 9 Mb/s

My settings for the HD-PVR are exactly like stranger's, that is VBR with max bit rate 13.5 MB/s. This translates to approximately 10 Mb/s average.

Obviously the comparison is done using the same decoder, in my case Microsoft's on Win 7.

I cannot tell the difference in a blind test. If I know beforehand which is which, I can persuade myself that the original bitstream is a tiny little bit better.

In my view, the Ambarella chip does an outstanding job.


BTW, 13.5 Mb/s CBR is unjustifiable quality-wise vs VBR and produces 35% larger files. So the bottom line is that the whole Digital-Analog-Digital conversion results in a 20% overhead (8.5 vs 10 Mb/s) with an almost nil quality drop.


There are many issues with HD-PVRs, but video quality has never been one of them for me.

[RocKKer]

My understanding (according to this) is the U-verse max bitrate per channel is ~6.5Mbps. The U-verse pipe is built on 25Mbps.

I'd be curious if you get a better PQ if you set the bitrate on the HD-PVR higher that that?

[Fuzzy]

Ideally, you'de have to run the HD-PVR a bit higher than the original source, to make up for a little but of the problems from the analog conversions... but nothing extreme.. After that, all you'd be doing is makeing sure you accurately reproduce uverse's artifacts from their limited rate, and use up quite a bit of disk space to do so.