Compatibility, LP-Mode

[Margit.Fiegert@t-online.de]

Hello,

I'm about to buy a DVB-c card, mainly for a DVR. I`m very happy to have
found this mailing list and did dig into the archive for quite long time
yesterday. Thanks to all you folk, especially Ralph and Klaus.

I`d like to support siemens since they support linux, but I can`t find a
shop in munich that sells one (hints very welcome!). Ordering would be
possible, but I really would like to start next weekend.
Hauppauge would be available and as far as I understood that would be
fine with the driver currently!? 

 But what with possible future features (eg. simultanious
record/playback)? 
 It sounded like some poeple do very low level programming here. 
 How far does compatibility go?


Another question:
As far as I see, data rate is about 3-5 Mbit/s. That would be about 20
hours on 40 GByte. Am I right? 
Commercially availible DVR do have some means to select quality, usually
in three levels equivalent to DVD, VHS, VHS-LP. Does anybody know how
they do this? They don`t decode/code I guess. 

 How can a MPEG2 stream be further compressed in realtime?
 Does anybody do this here? Does the card have hardware support on this?

What about recoding afterwords? Does anybody have a bigger archive in
lower quality? Degradation surly looks diffrent than with analog LP.
What amount of lower quality video is realistic on 40GB?

I hope to get a card soon, and (as far as time allows ;-) contribute to
the software, even if it sounds very promising already.

Greetings
    Michael