[mythtv-users] Best settings for transcoding HD content to save space?

[Raymond Wagner]

On 5/13/2014 1:55 PM, Steve Boyer wrote:
> On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 12:40 PM, Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com> wrote:
>> On 5/13/2014 1:21 PM, Eric Sharkey wrote:
>>> On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 7:50 PM, Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>> On 5/12/2014 6:52 PM, Ben Kamen wrote:
>>>>> I've been looking at my drive space wondering if I can trim down
>>>>> per/show usage by good transcoding settings.
>>>> You're best off just performing lossless cutting and being done with it.
>>>> Disk space is cheap.  Transcoding takes time.
>>> It's not really a one size fits all situation, from my point of view.
>>
>> Unless you need to fit within certain device or network constraints, such as
>> use on a mobile device with limited storage or playback support, or
>> streaming over the internet, you're best off with the original (or the
>> original minus ads).  PC storage is sufficiently cheap and trivial to add
>> that cutting your ~4GB MPEG2 recordings down to 1.5-2GB H264 isn't worth it.
> Just something to point out: 8 GB recordings of OTA HD recordings
> regularly compress down to less than 1 GB. The 2x-3x file size
> reduction that you claim is far from the 8x reduction I normally see.

2-3x is the generally accepted compressibility improvement of H264 over 
MPEG2.  8x results in a significant loss in quality.