Quality

Here I was planning to have a couple of mpeg movies coming from the NorthQ 7000/7100 hard-disk that shows what kind of quality it records in. I don't know if this is anything that is interesting or not, as this will be played on a PC screen instead of a TV.

Anyway, I have made four very short recordings to show the four different recording qualities. Each recording is only five seconds long, this is to keep the file size down. The recordings are from Eurosport (cycling), which probably isn't the best possible images to look at for checking the quality, but that's what it is.

These recordings were recorded from the NorthQ internal tuner and are made with the v2.01 firmware. This is how they were made:

	I made four different one minute timer-recordings in the four different recording qualities (EP, LP, SP, XP).
	I then removed the hard-disk from the NorthQ and hooked it up to my PC.
	I copied all four files to my PC hard-disk using the NorthQ PvrDiskUtil utility.
	I started up TMPGEnc and used its "MPEG Tools", "Merge & Cut" to select and cut out about five seconds from each recording.

This way I came up with the four mpeg-files below. They are not recompressed in any way, they are coming directly from the hard-disk in the NorthQ.

Here is a table showing some information about each file (timer-recordings):

If you make direct-recordings (press REC on the remote control), you end up with slightly different values:

In the v2.06 firmware, the timer-recordings and the direct-recordings have the same format. They both come out as files with the *.DAT extension, and they have the same bit-rate and resolution when recorded with the same quality (EP, LP, SP, XP).

Anyway, below are the four mpeg-files I have made (timer-recordings). Just click on them to download the corresponding zip-file which includes the MPEG-2 file.

	EP quality (1.5MB file): This is an example of the lowest quality recorded by the NorthQ 7000/7100. The EP quality is recorded with a video-stream data-rate of 2.2Mbit/s. One minute of EP quality recording takes about 17 MB of space on the hard-disk.
	LP quality (2.5MB file): The LP quality is recorded with a video-stream data-rate of 4Mbit/s. One minute of LP quality recording takes about 31 MB of space on the hard-disk.
	SP quality (4.0MB file): The SP quality is recorded with a video-stream data-rate of 6Mbit/s. One minute of SP quality recording takes about 46 MB of space on the hard-disk.
	XP quality (5.2MB file): This is the highest quality that the NorthQ can record with. It is recorded with a video-stream data-rate of 8Mbit/s. One minute of XP quality recording takes about 60 MB of space on the hard-disk.

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