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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mm1352000" data-source="post: 762911" data-attributes="member: 82144">Just to attempt to better answer sparky21: Talking about compression efficiency with TS is somewhat misleading. TS is just a container format like MPEG or MKV. TS files can contain h.264 or MPEG 2 video, MPEG or AAC audio, subtitles, teletext... and probably a variety of other stuff/formats too. When you tune to a channel with a digital tuner, TV Server receives the set of channels available on the same transponder/multiplex all wrapped up in a big TS container. What TV Server does is take the channel that you want to record/view, separate that from the other channels in the tuners TS container, and then copy it to your HDD in its own TS container. The encoding efficiency does not change during that process. In other words, the encoding format and efficiency depend entirely on what is supplied by the tuner, and the tuner just supplies what it receives over-the-air from the broadcaster...Theoretically it would be possible to re-encode the video + audio on-the-fly so that you get it in your preferred format and at a preferred quality level. In fact, we already encode analog signals on-the-fly for analog tuners that don't have hardware encoders. The thing is (as Ray correctly said), it would take a significant amount of CPU/GPU power to do the encoding in real time... to the point where it would certainly limit the number of channels you could concurrently watch/record with a single TV Server. Everyone would need very high end computers (or at least, computers that have only become mainstream in the last couple of years) just to do the basic things that have been taken for granted since TV Server was created 5+ (???) years ago. Recording the stream to the HDD as-received was the right design decision to make at the time TV Server was created. With today's more powerful computers it may be possible to re-encode on-the-fly for a limited number of channels. If that is a desirable feature then there is no particular reason why it couldn't be added, although I'd say it should probably be done as a part of MP 2 - it would be a *very* big job.mm</blockquote>

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