I get this question a lot, so I thought I'd post it in the forums here...
45Forever said:
Sorry to bother you again, but how do you keep the quality of your games up converting them from your DVR to DV/D When I convert mine they have to be compressed to fit on one disc. I have seen where some guys are using 2 discs for football games and that is fine, but I would really like to have my games on one disc. Now my basketball games fit on one disc fine because without comercials they are 45 minutes to an hour smaller than the football games. Let me know. Also I had mentioned something to Rocketmann about the basketball games next year when the "Thad Five" come in, making them like you have done with this years football games (Collectors Editon), what do you think? I can help out in anyway possible. Couple more questions, should I be making my DVDs with menus as you have done? Would that be something everyone would be interested in? And how hard, and how much time does it take you make them? I am all for this project and hope we can continue uploading Ohio State games for years to come.
I use a hacked DirecTV TiVo to get such small files. My files are the direct digital broadcast so there's never any reencoding.
Most people get a digital broadcast, but they have to record it in
analog format - then
reencode it to digital. This process makes the files bigger and reduces the quality since they use a $2000 home computer to encode the video. I'm getting the signal encoded using DirecTV's $20 million dollar muxers instead of a home PC.
It took a lot of work to get my TiVo hacked and that's the only way I'm aware of to record the video in straight digital. Even the DVRs with a built in DVD burner still convert from digital to analog and lose quality/increase file size.
You can learn more about it from
www.dealdatabase.com and
www.tivocommunity.com. Note that you will probably need DirecTV (or maybe Dish) to do this and the right kind of TiVo DVR. (Mine is a DirecTiVo Series 2)
My DVDs aren't standard DVD resulution. Most DVD video is 720x480 whereas myine are 480x480. That's the format of SVCDs which is why some older DVD players can't handle my DVDs. When I author my menus, I actually make 2x 30 second long videos - one for the game and one for the highlight video. Then I make the DVD menus out of those videos in ULead MF4 so I don't have to do a lot of reencoding. I then use a program called pgcedit to replace the two 30 second videos with the full length videos and reprogram the menus so the files line up.
It's a lengthy process that took a long time to figure out, but now that I know how to do it, it only takes 2 hours to put out a DVD with ultra-compressed video files and motion menus. (Of course the highlight videos take quite a bit of time to make also)
Hope that helps!