Rencode Digital TV Recordings to Save Space on HDD

Further compression that frees up any reasonable space is likely to significantly degrade the stored video. What about getting another hard drive? External 1TB drives are now under $100 and some 1TB "network" drives are under $150. That comes out 1000 shows at ~10-15 cents per show.

IMHO another drive is the better solution.

Check out this list of video tools from lifehacker. MediaCoder or Any Video Converter should do what you're looking for.

Top 10 Free Video Rippers, Encoders, and Converters

I usually use a program called Xilisoft Video Converter but that one isn't freeware.

Are you watching these on your computer or streaming them to a TV in your living room? If streaming to a TV then you should think about what video container you want them in.

If they are all SD recordings I would go with AVI but if they are HD I would go with MKV (providing you can play it)

Are these recording you made yourself with a PC TV tuner card? You don't see many videos in the MPG format anymore.

As for the suggestion of getting another HDD, its probably a good idea as well but if you have a desktop I would definitely go with an internal drive instead of an external. Once upon a time I used an external for storage leaving it on almost 24/7 with my computer. It died in just about a year. I have never had that problem with internal drives.

NCH software has several good choices of freeware, windows media video 9 VCM is capable of extreme compression too. Video compression 101

Seagate the hard drive manufacturer has several HD's specifically designed for use with video.

Further Information for those pondering the question... The bulk of these TV shows are SD shows taken directly from DVB-T tuners in my PC (as .ts files). I use Video Redo to remove the unwanted bits and save what's left as a 'dvd compliant' mpg file. The intention is to keep most of the files as mpg files, but convert the ones that I want to keep for more than a few days to another format that takes up less HDD space. I used to then convert them to DVD format/structure and burn them on DVD-RW media to play on the home DVD player. But I've bought a HDX1000 player and have networked it to my PC (10/100). So, I have the option of either playing the video as a 'share' or as a 'stream'. The HDX will cope with many media formats and containers. I just need to pick the ones that the HDX can handle... I know I will probably lose some quality, but I thought I would be able to convert the files to one of the less lossy but more condensed formats and save myself some space on my HDD. I already have a 1Gb drive installed in my PC and it's rapidly filling up!!! Thanks in advance Hammy

I haven't found a video codec that can squeeze more that 45 minutes SD into 700MB AND still look acceptable to me. Any more compression and the video artifacts really start to become annoying.

Hope you do find one that looks good to you. Best wishes.

What lossless codecs have you tried?

used to then convert them to DVD format/structure

Please to enlighten me to the particular aspect of this format? I can think of many times three...