The problem I am having is every once in a while a 30 minute show will be over 6 gigabytes! I average about 2 gigs for a 30 minute show now, so it is a large difference. I guess it wouldn't be a huge deal, but because of it, I end up running out of space if I do not monitor it every day. And then am forced to restart it

Anyway, can anyone shed some light on this??

Thanks,
Joe

Do you have anything set to automatically transcode? The default transcode for a PVR-x50 card is to go from MPEG2->RTJPEG, which will inflate file sizes similar to what you're seeing.

also what are you using to record, and what settings are you using, cause even 2G/30min is way too big for anything other than hdtv.

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Off the top of my head I am not certain about too many settings. I had struggled to get it working before and once I got it I left it. I am 99% sure it is RTJPEG. I will check when I get home tonight.

The card is a cheap bttv card. I think it is a WinTV go by happauge. I wasn't expecting much from it.

I have seen that too and it is intermittent. I have two tuners in my backend, one pvr 250 and one Hauppauge WinTV - I only see a spike on the WinTV. I have noticed that it seems to happen if I view any of the recording BEFORE it is completed. So, for example, if I open the file a few minutes into the recording, even for a few seconds, the end result is usually a factor of 2 or 3 times normal. It doesn't happen all the time though... weird.

So, I forgot to check last night, is there a way to determine the settings I need to find out from a command line, or a cfg file?

Ok, so it was at RTJPEG, I changed it to MPEG4 and the file sizes are much smaller. A 30 minutes show went from 2.1 GB to 380 MB! So now my question is, if they are much smaller, I am guessing that the machine will be using much more cpu? I have not noticed it yet, do you think I will? It is a 1.8 ghz machine witheither 256 or 512 ram.

MPEG4 uses more cpu for encoding, but less for decoding.

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Xsecrets

Been using it now for a bit and I am not noticing much of a difference at all. Thanks again for all the help.