Hi All

I'm having problems editing tv programmes that i've captured from freeview through a Hauppauge WinTV Nova T 500.

I capture directly using the WinTV software in the only quality available: "DVD 2048 bytes". I am assured by the manual that this is "native MPEG quality". Checking the bitrate of the files in PD6 shows that the bitrate varies, as it should, according to what channel the broadcast came from.

I would like to trim these files of excess footage - mainly adverts from the beginning middle and end. I would then like to save the files out as indivudual programmes in the same quality in which they were produced with no other changes.

Producing the files as HQ DVD results in files that 'look' very similar but in file size are much larger. eg: original file 58 minutes 1.03Gb, produced file 44 minutes 2.45GB. Trying to lower the bitrate to the maximum possible from the channel the file was recorded from eg Film4 Ave. 2.35Mbps, Max. 7.07Mbps, audio 160kbps resulted in poor quality reproductions.

Which of course is why we have SVRT. Except I can't get it to work. Setting any of these files to produce with SVRT results in the machine hogging all of the cpu, but not doing anything. I have left it running for over seven hours and I still don't have even 1% completion. On aborting the program typically crashes.

I do need to do more tests to find out just when this problem occurs but in the meantime any ideas?

Any help appreciated,
kind regards
Benjamin