What are the best video compression settings to use? I want to try to limit like 1hr of tv = 700meg max with good quality and sound. Anyone know the best settings to use?

that's a rather optomistic goal. If you have a software based card mpeg4 might get you close, however I don't think you can get there with reasonable quality with mpeg2 (pvr cards). If you have a hardware card like the pvr or dvb cards you might look into automatic transcoding.

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Xsecrets

I dont think its being too optimistic, with the settings I have now its pretty close but I was not sure if anyone else has a perfect setup. And it is a software card not hardware.

well like I said with software card and mpeg4 you could probably get there, just lower your bitrate till it hits 700.

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Xsecrets

Using "lossy" compression (essentially all video codecs) you only got two knobs to turn to reduce the datafile size: 1) image size 2) image quality. You can cheat a bit on #1 by discarding hidden information as the default 480x480 profiles show, but on #2 it's simply a matter of how much image degradation you can stomach.

Well I am capturing @ 352x240... I am jsut wondering how low I can go on video/audio before it starts to show a real loss. The only reason I am wondering is because I dont have a TON of hard drive space so I want to keep the files small but with tv quality...

I know it doesn't sound helpful, but that really comes down to your eye and ear. If it looks and sounds good enough to you, then it's good enough.