From Jamie Davis:

Russell,

First off , I want to thank you for the article on a time-shifting PC.
I blatantly stole the script for my own pc to record programs when I'm
late at work and can't get home in time.  I have experimented
extensively with different recording programs and parameters and would
like to share the results with you and you can perhaps add them to your
PVR page.

You must have the lame mp3 encoder installed for audio.

Here are my low quality settings.  I set it up so that 60 minutes of
recording is just under 700 MB of disk space-- so the entire 1hr program
will fit on a CDR.  I just replaced the streamer line from your script
with the following:

mencoder -tv
on:driver=v4l:device=/dev/video0:norm=NTSC:width=640:height=480
-oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=1400 -vop pp=lb
-endpos
$2 -o $f.avi

The high quality settings are only slightly different, and take about
1.3 GB/Hr:

mencoder -tv
on:driver=v4l:device=/dev/video0:norm=NTSC:width=640:height=480 -oac
mp3lame -ovc lavc -lameopts preset=medium -lavcopts
vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=3000:keyint=132 -vop pp=lb -endpos $2 -o $f.avi

Thanks again for the nice little script and the tutorial that got me
started recording on my own system.  Almost forgot-- My system is an
Athlon XP 1700+ with 512MB RAM, so I don't know if there will be
problems with your celeron 400.  I get about 25-30% cpu utilization
while recording.  You can take out the -vop pp=lb (software
deinterlacer) to see if you save cycles that way, but I seem to recall
that if there is high motion, combing artifacts will reduce the
effectiveness of the encoder.

-- Jamie

---------------

Jamie later mentioned that Mencoder 0.90rc3 can be found at:

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design5/news.html