OK - I'm not sure why, but when I edit the recordings to strip out unwanted material (commercials, etc...) the file becomes twice as large! I started out with a 1.1 GB file, then cut out the stuff I won't want so I could save space, and the final result was a 2.2GB file! What gives? It's supposed to be smaller?

UPDATE: I'm wondering if this may be it? I am using an external plextor convertx (which is using Divx/mp4?) to record my shows. I'm wondering if mythtranscode is not encoding it back to the same compression format? Would anyone know how I can check this and how I can enable divx compression to regain the largely lost space I've consumed?

OK, I think I may have figured this one out... sorry for the post. I just checked my transcode options and it was set to RTjpeg instead of MPEG-4. I've since changed it and am retranscoding. Will post the results soon...

yup that was it - enabling MPEG-4 in the transcode menu instead of RTjpeg made the file a mere 780MB instead of 2.2 Gb. Hope this may help someone out later...