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I don't know how your game console encodes. A good DVD recorder using high quality settings and encoders will encode with a "target" bitrate of 6.2 Mbps VBR (variable Bit Rate), with a max bitrate set as 8.5 or 9.0 Mbps, using GOP sizes between 11 and 15 frames. Playback of that DVD will hit low bitrates of about 3.2 for static scenes and around 7.0 for fast action, very rarely hitting a 9.0 max on playback. An HD PVR records HD 1080i at typically a target bitrate of about 14.0 Mbps VBR and 20.0 Mbps max, and most of the time plays back at bitrates between 6 and 9 Mbps, hitting higher rates during action. At that bitrate I record 2-hour HDTV episodes in 1080i with h264 encoding that are usually about 11GB in size. A 90-minute TV episode recorded as SD DVD on the recorder at high-quality 6.0 Mbps VBR is about 3.8 to 4.1 GB. With a clean signal you can get a smaller DVD file with a 5.0 VBR bitrate -- but it better be a pretty clean signal and you'd better be using a good encoder.
I should think volksjager's earlier advice favoring an HD PVR is more correct. Elgato game capture has limitations worth thinking about. In order to get video off of your PS3, you'll have to re-record it. That makes little sense, when you could use a PVR to record directly to a computer -- the video can be copied directly to a USB drive or other external storage in 5 minutes to be played on an external player. Or on the PC it can be reorganized and burned directly to disc as SD BluRay or HD BluRay/AVCHD. No one in this hobby would recommend re-recording lossy video or re-encoding it, except those who either don't know what they're doing, or who don't see so well, or who don't care. Now and then you do encounter a broadcast that has been deliberately set up with a non-standard or substandard structure to prevent smart-render editing and has to be re-encoded or reorganized with the proper software. With a good encoder, you can set parameters for these problem babies that prevent further damage. With external hard drive storage, a 500 GB USB drive can hold about 75 hours of HD 1080i video from an HD PVR, leaving 15% of the drive for free working space. For SD BluRay or DVD at 6.0 Mbps, that drive would hold about 160 hours of video.
The episode of Castle from which you saw a brief sample was recorded at 14.0 Mbps at 1080i. The episode was copied to a USB drive and then to a PC in about 12 minutes, with no re-recording involved. On the computer it was opened with Avisynth and inverse telecined with the TIVTC plugin and saved as losslessly compressed AVI. As progressive 23.97fps video it was downsampled in Avisynth using free special-purpose downsampling and cleanup filters, then encoded with TMPGenc Plus 2.5 as DVD with soft-coded 3:2 pulldown to 720x480 MPEG2. Six of these TV episodes were treated in that manner, then all the MPEG2's were authored and burned to dual-layer DVD using TMPGenc Authoring Works. So there's an almost endless variety of ways to go with the recorings, but I'd say the best quality will start with a PVR.
If you borrow retail DVD's, free software is used to decrypt them directly to MPEG files as an exact copy onto a computer, instead of re-recording them to a DVD recorder, or instead of re-recording them via Elgato to a console and then re-recordimg them again to a PC. Basically, re-recording is the same thing as re-encoding. Each re-encode is a quality loss to one extent or another, and lower-tier or budget re-encoding gear or lower-bitrate re-encoding means more quality loss.
In any case people use what they like, not what others want them to use. And, yep, there's the budget to consider.
Last edited by sanlyn; 09-25-2014 at 08:57 PM.
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