TLUG Sliding Scale

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Dec 20, 2004 at 09:22:54AM -0500, Teddy Mills wrote:
> Recording from DV to a VHS/VCR line-in is easy.
> Thus, I transfered the recent TLUG meeting (Colins McGregors Knoppix) to 
> VHS.
> 
> However, I was thinking of recording a MPEG1 file also.
> I thought of recording a high quality MPEG, say 4000Kb/sec.  But there 
> is a problem with that.
> First,  the MPEG capture card is not the greatest, nor is the PC it is 
> in. (PIII-450)
> Thus I think recording about 2000Kb/sec is about the maximum it will do 
> without starting to degrade the video/audio.
> 
> So I decided on recording a lower quality MPEG1, say about the quality 
> of a VCD.
> I am not making VCDs, since VCDs make no sense these days.
> I am just recording it to a VCD level of quality MPEG1 file. (Assume 
> 60MB/hour: 1MB/minute)
> 
> I was thinking of uploading these meetings to a server somewhere that 
> can do some moderate bandwidth,
> or perhaps bring some DVDs to every meeting with all the meetings on them.
> 
> That means downloading 600MB for 1 hour of video.
> It is up to your people to decide what level of audio/video you think is 
> best.
> 
> 
> If it were me, I would choose about 500k/minute, translates to about 15 
> hours/15 meetings per DVD.
> Plus, everyone would prefer downloading 300MB as opposed to 600MB.
> 
> If you want, you can just get the .MP3 file of the audio...That would be 
> like 50 or 100kb or so!

Why wouldn't you just connect the DV cam to a firewire port and dump the
ram DV mpeg2 data to the machine, and then convert it down in resolution
if necesary or to divx (or other mpeg4 format)?  The mpeg2 compression
is much better than mpeg1 and would result in a much smaller file.
mpeg4 of course is way better compression where you can get almost
DVD quality at about 350M/hour or so.

Lennart Sorensen
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