[curzon35]

I have Showcentre 200 that is streaming mainly avi files wirelessly to my CRT Sony 32"TV with total success. I am shortly buying an HD Ready TV. The HD material (mpg) I have "acquired" will not stream wirelessly but is ok via a cat 5 cable. I would like however to connect my standalone Hard Disk with USB2 to the Showcentre via USB but am mindfuil of the FAT32/4gig limit
If I convert my HD content typically 6-10 gig, to DIVX I may be able to fit it on a 4 gig partition and stream locally via usb, but when i get my new telly, will the HD quality be preserved or is it lost in the conversion
Am I better running a cat5 cable and streaming from my pc, the other issue is space as even a very large hard disc fills up with HD material
Thanks

[mmace]

it depends how you convert them
I use AutoGK and preserve the 5.1 audio and choose my resolution (keeping them HD).

You're still going to want a high bitrate though otherwise you'll get macroblocking

I've just finished converting Spider-Man 1 & 2 from TS files to DivX and the lowest I got them down to with no (or very little) macroblocking was just under 6Gb (9000kb/sec)

have you looked into x264?
you can use an even lower bitrate and keep the quality (3-4Gb films)
the only downside is the amount of time it takes to encode and the CPU power it takes to play (although nVidia are about to release an update to enable their cards to use hardware acceleration on them)

[dan1979]

Was going to suggest x.264 also but I read it can take something like three days to encode a film.

[mmace]

depends on the software, I did a 2 hour film the other day and it took around 36 hours using mainconcept on my PIV 3Ghz HT with 2Gb DDR RAM keeping it's resolution the same (720p)

am gonna try nero recode soon, from past experience it's quite fast