Plextor Video Products

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

BrianEWilliams <sorry_no_email@yahoo.com> wrote:
> http://www.plextor.com/english/pro [...] t_dvc.html

> This one looks pretty cool with direct to divx pvr capability:

> http://www.plextor.com/english/products/TV402U.htm

> This space is going to get pretty crowded, and prices will really drop
> soon.

I use the ConvertX PVR PX-TV402U with the products that came with (WinDVR5 and
some dvd recording prg), and with SageTV. It works fine and I have no
complaints about quality but I do have one caveat:

If you think you're going to see the quality/size you get by transcoding
something to xvid or divx using a two-pass virtualdub or drdivx, you can
forget it. Best Divx Theater Quality (4000 mbps, 720x480) takes up about 1.6 G
per hour. The quality's good, but you still see some artifacting on motion
scenes. I get better results with 2-pass xvid or divx at something like 2000
mbps, at under 1 G per hour.

There may be tweaks that I'm unaware of. So far, I've used the standard Divx
qualities, and have tried a few of my own as well (playing with bitrates both
vid and aud, and screen size mainly).

In the end, it's an inexpensive one-pass hardware encoder. It's probably
unfair to compare it to two-pass soft encoders on the quality/size front.

For movies from TV that I want to archive, I'll record them in regular mpeg
format at a very high quality (6+ G for two hours) and 2-pass vdub (or drdivx)
them to xvid (or divx) at around 1.5 g for the 2 hours. Beautiful results
usually. But for the hour-long shows I'll go back to the high-quality Divx
hardware format at 1.6 G because the equivalent quality in mpeg would come in
at around 2.2 or 2.5 G for the same quality and because I'm probably not going
to be archiving them, just moving as many as possible to RW discs for viewing
on a divx-capable player (642 in my case), sharing some, then erasing.

So be warned. Good product, but not as efficient as two-pass encoding. Nex