R.Oehler@xxxxxxxxxx said: AVI seems to achieve better compression than mpeg. I have used both mp1e and NVrec (the FFMPEGrec part) to record TV shows to my HD from the TV card. For mp1e I then used mpeg2divx to transcode the mpeg into an avi file (which takes less space). The problem is that mpeg2divx is absolutely unable to handle files bigger than 2GB, which is something like one hour of mpeg. However, MPlayer (latest versions) has no problem playing mpeg files over 2GB, so I assume mencode (part of MPlayer package) will be able to transform such files into avi format. AVI/divx files are smaller for the same visual quality than mpegs, but they take more CPU to encode. So you have to decide which you have less of: CPU power, or disk space? Avi format has a hard limit (in the standard) of 2GB/file, but that is about 3 hours at 1500 kbit/sec, and only around 70 minutes for mp1e. I currently use FFMPEGrec (part of NVrec package) for recording my TV shows. It uses around twice as much CPU as mp1e, but I have plenty of CPU. It also has some slight problems with recording sound, but they can be worked around easily, and the author has been very responsive so far, so I trust they will be fixed soon. (I am recording movies at 512x384 on Athlon 1.2GHz/512MB, with 20-25% CPU for mp1e and 50-54% CPU for FFMPEGrec).
