[mythtv-users] Resolutions for PAL

[Christian Hack]

> I'm tweaking my profile settings and am trying to decide the best 
> resolutions to use for the 4 standard profiles.  I am in a 
> PAL area and 
> the examples given in the docs are for NTSC and although it does give 
> some info on PAL.  I was wondering what other people were 
> using or is it 
> just a case of trial and error to see what looks/performs best?

Yes trial and error. But the docs are fairly clear. The differences
between PAL and NTSC are essentially the number of lines (excluding the
colour bandwidth). So in the examples replace 480 with 576 and 240 with
288 for PAL land. Horizontal resolution is for all intents and purposes
the same between NTSC and PAL. Personally I use 640x576 or 480x576.

> Also, I am using RTjpeg because I understand that this uses less CPU 
> than MPEG4 but what is the tradeoff when using MPEG4/RTjpeg 
> for transcoding?

MPEG4 files require more CPU but take less disk space (mine are of the
order of 1 GB/hour)
RTJPEG files require less CPU but more disk space. I can't give examples
since I never used RTJPEG but from memory I recorded a few things in
RTJPEG by accident and saw files of the order 4-5GB/hour on a fairly
noisy signal (interference in the PC)

See also here under hard disks
http://www.mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-3.html#ss3.1

CH