Hello,

I am recording sporting events ( Ice skating ) from DIGITAL cable with elgato eyetv hybrid. I understand with digital cable eyetv records IN the format the signal is received in. The boadcaster sets the bitrate. The problem is, some of my recordings have a low bitrate of only 3.5 MPS. . . pretty low, but it looks like I cannot do anything about it.
I have been experimenting with re encoding the MPEG2 to a higher bitrate IN ROXIO Toast Titanium 8 and burning, AND also NOT re encoding, then burning the MPEG2 in its original recorded MPEG2 file. I get pixelation during closeups with very fast action when not re encoded. Problem is when re- encoding, there seems to be other issues coming up,
some of the skaters movements are not as smooth compared to disks burned with no re encoding and the pixelation is not much improved.

Am I right here. . . If the original source MPEG2 file is in low quality there is not much one can do with it as re- encoding further reduces quality ?

I have also exported the recorded MPEG2 file in DV format and burned with iDVD trying all the quality settings, the results have been WORSE than just burning the original recorded MPEG2 with Roxio Toast and NO re encoding. Converting a low quality MPEG2 file UP to DV then back DOWN to mpeg2 is a bad idea as quality is lost at every conversion.

Any advise, comments, etc are welcome as I would like to learn more from those with more experience.
Thank You for your time.

Carmine V.

The problem isn't just the bit rate. The video's resolution is smaller than 720x480 (I'm presuming you're in an an NTSC area). When you've done the re-encoding the resolution is getting resampled to a larger size which means that pixels are having to be created based on neighboring pixels. When you don't re-encode the DVD player automatically rescales the video to the full resolution.

I don't know what to suggest. My preference is to leave the video as is without re-encoding. (Have you checked one of those DVDs using a different DVD player?)

If you do re-encode make sure you have Half-Pel checked because that helps a lot with fast motion scenes.