Hi, thanks for looking at this thread.

I recently bought a Hauppauge 1600 PCI Analog/Digital tuner. So far my experience has been very good. After purchasing a Terk unamplified antenna I've been getting all the digital channels no prob and have been using Beyond TV 4.6's 21 day trial. Working very nicely. (Could be that I live 0.5 mi from all the towers in Portland!)

My main problem is that digital recordings eat up my harddrive fast. I kind of don't understand why 2 hours of hauppauge MPEG2 encoded streams take up 4x the space of a 2 hr DVD.

Does anyone know whether any other tuner cards over different hardware encoding settings or codecs? I seem to remember an Mp4 encoder but maybe that was for analog. Beyond TV has showsqueeze but it seems to take forever and I'd rather just compress it at the start.

My only requirement is the tuner card must receive ATSC signals (an included remote is a bonus). I don't need QAM or analog at all.

Thanks for any recommendations!

Hi, thanks for looking at this thread.

I recently bought a Hauppauge 1600 PCI Analog/Digital tuner. So far my experience has been very good. After purchasing a Terk unamplified antenna I've been getting all the digital channels no prob and have been using Beyond TV 4.6's 21 day trial. Working very nicely. (Could be that I live 0.5 mi from all the towers in Portland!)

My main problem is that digital recordings eat up my harddrive fast. I kind of don't understand why 2 hours of hauppauge MPEG2 encoded streams take up 4x the space of a 2 hr DVD.

Does anyone know whether any other tuner cards over different hardware encoding settings or codecs? I seem to remember an Mp4 encoder but maybe that was for analog. Beyond TV has showsqueeze but it seems to take forever and I'd rather just compress it at the start.

My only requirement is the tuner card must receive ATSC signals (an included remote is a bonus). I don't need QAM or analog at all.

Thanks for any recommendations!
I'm not aware of any tuner card doing on-the-fly encoding of HD material. They all pretty much just save the MPEG stream.

As for file size, the reason that HD files are much larger than DVD files is the overally bit rate. DVDs are limited to 9Mbps while HD broadcasts can go up to 19.2 Mbps. That's about twice the information at the top limit. Most DVDs aren't encoded at 9Mbps. But then again, most HD broadcasts are at 19.2 Mpbs either.

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I am not aware of any ATSC tuner card that will decode the already encoded incoming video and recode it at another bit rate or at a lower resolution. It would not make sense becasue you would lose all of the benefit of getting High Resolution Picture Quality.
The hardware encoder on the card is strictly for use of the analog tuner or of the S-Video input to the card.

"I kind of don't understand why 2 hours of hauppauge MPEG2 encoded streams take up 4x the space of a 2 hr DVD. "

Because your capturing HD resolutions vs 480i resolutions that DVDs offer. If you are capturing any SD programs, use the SD version of the channel to save space, if your recording SD on an HD channel, it's upconverted and will take up more space.

Just to amplify mjones73 comments. DVDs use 720x480i resolution which means 340K pixels per frame and refreshes at the rate of 30 frames per second.
1080i HD is 1920x1080i or 2.1 Megapixels per frame and also refreshes at the rate of 30 frames per second.
Therfore 1080i requires 4x times as much diskspace to store a program as to store a DVD.
720p takes only slightly less space since it refreshes at the rate of 60 frames per second.

Luminance samples per second

Film sourced (24p movies and episodic series)

DirecTV SD 5,529,600
Comcast SD 6,842,880
480p24 8,294,400 (DVD)
720p24 22,118,400
DirecTV "HDTV Lite" 33,177,600
1080p24 49,766,400

Video sourced (60i/30p sports, concerts, live broadcasts)

DirecTV SD 6,912,000
Comcast SD 7,603,200
480i60 10,368,000 (DVD)
DirecTV "HDTV Lite" 41,472,000
720p60 55,296,000
1080i60 62,208,000
1080p60 124,416,000 (future cable channels)

Pixels per second

Film-sourced (movies and series / episodic)

480p24 8,294,400 (DVD)
720p24 22,118,400
DirecTV "HDTV Lite" 33,177,600
1080p24 49,766,400

Video (sports, concerts, live broadcasts)

480i60 10,368,000 (D1 video)
DirecTV "HDTV Lite" 41,472,000
720p60 55,296,000
1080i60 62,208,000
1080p60 124,512,000 (future cable channels)

Though "pixel" is a misleading concept in video - as only luma samples are broadcast at the full sampling rate, with the chroma samples broadcast at a reduced horizontal (and usually also vertical) resolution. This can be simplified to a reduction to 12 bits per pixel from the 24 bits often assumed - but in spatial terms to talk of a broadcast video signal being made of "pixels" implies that each "pixel" is independent of all the others - when in chroma (and thus RGB) terms they aren't.

Hi, thanks for looking at this thread.

I recently bought a Hauppauge 1600 PCI Analog/Digital tuner. So far my experience has been very good. After purchasing a Terk unamplified antenna I've been getting all the digital channels no prob and have been using Beyond TV 4.6's 21 day trial. Working very nicely. (Could be that I live 0.5 mi from all the towers in Portland!)

My main problem is that digital recordings eat up my harddrive fast. I kind of don't understand why 2 hours of hauppauge MPEG2 encoded streams take up 4x the space of a 2 hr DVD.

Does anyone know whether any other tuner cards over different hardware encoding settings or codecs? I seem to remember an Mp4 encoder but maybe that was for analog. Beyond TV has showsqueeze but it seems to take forever and I'd rather just compress it at the start.

My only requirement is the tuner card must receive ATSC signals (an included remote is a bonus). I don't need QAM or analog at all.

Thanks for any recommendations!

As others have mentioned HD video takes up more space than DVD video because it is higher resolution and higher quality.

The reason digital TV receiver cards are so low cost is that they don't actually have to do anything much to work - they just tune the digital signal, demodulate it, and pass the received digital data stream to the PC. The PC itself then usually decodes the HD MPEG2 video in the data to display a picture. The card itself doesn't have to have any MPEG2 video decoding or encoding hardware on-board - it is receiving MPEG2 already compressed for transmission by the broadcaster (and usually compressed with a pretty good encoder - certainly one costing a lot more than a PC card!)

The digital video card itself just passes on the video exactly as broadcast (meaning recordings are identical in quality to the original received broadcast) - and thus the broadcaster dictates the data rate (and thus the hard drive space) used for each station.

This is in direct contrast to the MPEG2 encoders often found on analogue capture cards - which take an analogue TV signal, digitise it and then compress it, with the compression (and thus data rate/disc space) chosen by the end user, with the obvious quality trade-offs.

If similar functionality were required with a digital TV Card it would need for the card to have a hardware MPEG2 decoder, possibly a scaler (to reduce the resolution) and an MPEG2 encoder, or for the PC to be running software that performed a similar function. Doing it on the TV card would be much more expensive, and reduce picture quality. Doing it on the PC in real time would need a reasonably powerful PC - though there is nothing to stop you doing this to recordings after they have been made using a Divx or Windows Media re-compressor, or something like TMPGEnc to convert to DVD standard def format.

I realize putting all those sources in one table is really mixing apples and oranges. If you can better format that information, please do so.

I realize putting all those sources in one table is really mixing apples and oranges. If you can better format that information, please do so.

I'd just replace "pixels per second" with "unique luminance samples per second".

(The 24p stuff is slightly confusing - because of the repeated frames/fields present, even in a baseband 60i or 60p signal carrying 24p material)

Wow. Thanks for the posts. I should have clarified that the non-HD recordings are stil taking up a lot of space. 1080 and 720 stuff would no doubt take more space than 480i. When I get home all compare file sizes for some of the different recordings to see what SD is recorded at.

Thanks for the replies. Anyone want to comment on PVR software that will recode or compress files? I don't have an HD tv so I don't need full 1080i. I got the tuner more for the clear reception vs analog OTA.

As I said in my other post, when recording SD, use an SD version of the channel, if you record SD on the HD version of a channel, it's usually upconverted to HD resolutions and will take up more space. That is why non-HD recordings are taking up so much space on you.

anyone know of any PCI HD Tuner cards that have a dual tuner that support QAM as well as the analog channels?

As I said in my other post, when recording SD, use an SD version of the channel, if you record SD on the HD version of a channel, it's usually upconverted to HD resolutions and will take up more space. That is why non-HD recordings are taking up so much space on you.

Yes - SD recordings made from the HD channels will be recorded in 1080i/720p - as the HD channels broadcast 480i material upconverted to 1080i/720p.

However if you record the SD analogue NTSC broadcasts these will be hardware compressed by your capture card - and you may be able to chose the compression quality (I've never used MCE for analogue capture - and I'm not sure if it is a user option or registry hack to alter the recording quality) However SD shows shot in digital component should look a lot better quality via the HD route than the SD NTSC analogue broadcast route - and you may notice a drop on some shows if you record the SD analogue broadcast.

The MCE TV set up for analog tuners offers you 4 quality levels for recording and even "Best" is not that good. Live TV in MCE always uses Best.

I was considering buying that Haup 1600 today. But if recordings take up so much diskspace, is there a utility to convert them? say 1 hour of HDTV to dvd? Would Premiere Pro 2 do that?

Wouldn't be HD anymore if you converted it to DVD, DVD's are 480i.