I just recorded ~44 minutes of an episode of Stargate SG-1 which I’d originally recording without using conversion. The original recording is the full 60 minutes.
Original recording:
Output codec - MPEG2VIDEO
Container - Transport Stream (.ts)
Audio codec - AC3 (Stereo)
Resolution - 480i
Final file size - 743 MB
New, with convert while recording:
Output codec - HEVC
Container - Transport Stream (.ts)
Audio codec - AC3 (Stereo)
Resolution - 480p (it was apparently de-interlaced while recording)
Final file size - 397 MB
Even with the difference in recording time, there appears to be a fairly decent file size savings. (Halving the original would give ~371.5 MB, which is not that far off of the converted version.)
This was with the Transcode Quality set to 50, so I don’t know how much you’ll save on file size with it set to 99.
One other quick note: I noticed that the original I recorded had closed captions; the new one with conversion did not. I don’t know if that’s an artifact of the conversion or if they just weren’t present in the broadcast for some reason.
I’m going to record another full episode in about 40 minutes with the quality set to 99 to have a more apples-to-apples comparison.
[Edit]
@Tony_T For the full hour recording, with conversion to HEVC and quality set to 99, the final recording was 1.14 GB in size. This is compared to the original MPEG2VIDEO recording which is 778 MB in size. (To my eyes the perceived quality is identical between my earlier recording at 50 versus 99.)
I’m performing a final test in about 10 minutes which will be the same, but converting to H.264 instead of HEVC. The HEVC encoding work in PMS is still ongoing, so there may be some other factors at play affecting the results above; clearly an MPEG2 being converted to HEVC resulting in a near double file size is undesirable.
