Capturing a show on tv that is protected, Video Bitrate question?
 

Hello,

I use a TIVO to capture 99.999% of my stuff, mainly for the convenience factor as I don't have to be there, watch it, baby it, pat it on the back etc. All is good most of the time except when there is something I want to watch on lets say HBO. My tivo will record it no problem but I can't transfer it off the tivo as tivo flags any protected channels. Most of them are premium channels anyways so no big loss really.

So there was this amazing documentary on HBO earlier this week called "life according to sam" (watch it!), anyways I'd like to remove it from my tivo an keep it on a HD as I do with most of the shows I watch. So I hooked up rcas from my tivo to my capture device then to my PC and re-captured it via virtualdub. I know I've broken every cardinal rule known to mankind probably.

But after checking my video in mediainfo I've noticed my video bitrate is through roof (pushing 250 Mbps) I know that cant be my actual video bitrate so how would I figure out what the real bitrate of the video is? I have no desire to share this anywhere its just for personal keeps I'm just wondering how to encode it to a safe bitrate without it being bloated or killing the quality as its analog already which doesn't help.

The net bitrate of an ATSC channel is roughly 19.39 megabits per second. Most cable channels are lower to squeeze in more channels. If you can, try and capture the HD feed in SD quality, anamorphic 16:9 of course.

thanks njroadfan :)

Sounds like you recorded uncompressed. I guess what you mean by "real bitrate" is what the HBO channel streamed into your Tivo was actually at, but that's irrelevant now that you have a downrezzed copy. You could encode it using x264 at maybe CRF 18? If you don't want it on DVD.

BTW, why didn't you use S-Video...

I was mainly testing it out, I have it saved until I delete it so it isn't going anywhere :) but I planned on using s-vid