What is Showsqueeze? Should it be set?

[fsteadham]

This may seem like a simple question, but we purchased through download & have no user's guide. Can anybody give a brief but detailed explanantion of what showsqueeze is & if I need to set my recordings for this? What benefit will it give? Thanks a lot! Frances

[jebbbz]

Showsqueeze is an option to convert big files into smaller ones by recoding or transcoding them into a more efficient file format.

If you are recording digital TV, whether high definition or standard definition, you cannot control how Beyond TV first records them -- they will be in so-called transport stream format which is basically MPEG2 with some extra data. Similarly, if you are recording analog TV (over-the-air or non-digital cable) with a TV tuner that has hardware MPEG2 encoding built in you will have no choice of recording format -- it will be MPEG2 because hardware encoding is fast but inflexible. An hour of high definition TV may take six to eight gigabytes of hard drive space. An hour of regular TV may take two gigabytes

MPEG2 files, however, are bigger than equivalent quality files in MPEG4 formats (e.g., WMV or DivX), say, three or four times larger (you can vary the amount of squeezing -- too much and you hurt quality). Thus, after Showsqueeze a high def show takes up only two gigabytes and a regular TV recording only 500 megabytes.

If file size matters a lot to you because you don't want to add more or bigger hard drives or because you want to be able to send the video files over a network, you would rather have the smaller sized files. Showsqueeze converts big MPEG2 files into small MPEG4 files but this can take a lot of time as it is hard on your CPU. So you can record in MPEG2 and set Showsqueeze to run overnight.

Some TV tuner cards are able to record directly in MPEG4 formats because they do not have high speed specialized hardware encoders built in. Instead they use your computer's CPU to do the encoding (the tuner card will convert the analog signal into uncompressed digital) but you may sacrifice a good deal of quality and can overload your CPU if you try to use your computer for anything else, including playback of recorded shows, while the show is recording. Encoding is hard and encoding a one hour show in one hour, as it is broadcast, requires horsepower.

If you have lots of hard drive space and don't want to keep copies of every show you watch don't worry about Showsqueeze.

[jackc111]

ShowSqueeze is also clutch if you're moving your shows over to a handheld device. The whole reason I use BTV w/ Showsqueeze is to move Dish Network programming onto my Zen Vision M. Showsqueeze allows me to fit about 8 times more programming on the device that I could otherwise. In fact, you might notice that BTV comes with a pre-made Zen Vision M compression setting. Very convenient.

[myktek]

Originally Posted by jackc111

ShowSqueeze is also clutch if you're moving your shows over to a handheld device. The whole reason I use BTV w/ Showsqueeze is to move Dish Network programming onto my Zen Vision M. Showsqueeze allows me to fit about 8 times more programming on the device that I could otherwise. In fact, you might notice that BTV comes with a pre-made Zen Vision M compression setting. Very convenient.

How do you like your M? I just returned my Vision W last week...waiting for the Archos 605 wifi now... it has h.264 and divx support plus wifi browsing and etc... it has a kick stand.... which really annoyed me w/ the W, had to hold it on the plane the whole trip.