Yep.
Lower broadcast MPEG-2 is Blu-ray MPEG-2 (15Mb/s 720x480), and I'm using that for most rare personal TV VHS recordings. This works best for video tapes being converted to digital.
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There are four possible workflows:
Format | Media | Size per hour | Benefits | Drawbacks |
Huffyuv AVI | Hard drive | 35-40GB/hour | Lossless, no compression artifacts | size |
MPEG-2 for DVD | DVD-Video | max 4GB/hour | Standard DVD | Quality is not "the best" |
MPEG-2 broadcast bitrate | Hard drive or Blu-ray | avg 10GB/hour (15mpbs) | Better than DVD, smaller than Huffyuv | not DVD |
H.264 | Blu-ray, HTPC | ~1GB/hour | Better than DVD | must encode to H.264 |
Note that my size for H.264 may be off (up to 2GB/hour max), as I've not measured it to date.
The downside to H.264 is that you cannot (and/or SHOULD not) capture to it directly. It's not a capturing format.
HTPC = plays in a "media center" like the Western Digital WDTV, and is stored on hard drives.
With an ATI All In Wonder card, you can capture to lower-end MPEG-2 broadcast, up to 20MB/s
Or capture directly to MPEG-2 for DVD, with slight quality loss against lossless > 2-pass MPEG conversions.
And it can capture lossless AVI via
VirtualDub or ATI MMC, but
VirtualDub is suggested.
So ... which one interests you most? I use all four, depending on what I feel is best for the scenario. There's no one right answer.
Personally, I suggest MPEG-2 broadcast specs, if long-term archiving family home movies.
If it's just TV recordings, and they're not impossibly rare, then I'd suggest going straight to DVD-Video MPEG specs.
If you have some sort of amazingly rare video, capture as Huffyuv, then encode it to a second "watchable" copy (DVD, fore example).