SD or HD broadcasts kept on DVD

[Phototaker]

I have stood very close to our Sony Bravia full 1080HD TV & switched back & forward from the SD & HD broadcast & often find that I can't see any difference at all. I know that a full HD bradcast require the station to have really good source media. When it comes to recording the so called HD bradcasts that don't appear to be genuine HD either onto a PVR or onto a PC's HDD it would appear that sometimes these HD broadcasts are just SD broadcasts pumped out with a higher bit rate which don't improve the picture at all & only mean bigger file sizes. Does anyone else agree with me on this? If so I would assume that if the same show is on both SD & HD we would be better off just recording the SD signal, agree? If we do record the HD signal & wish to keep the program on a DVD what is the best way to do this, since the bit rates are often well in excess of the maximum allowed for MPEG2 DVD's?

[Gully]

There is really no point in recording HD to then convert to burn to a DVD from the view of video quality as it all would get lost anyway so stick with SD if you can.

The only aspect that might be different is you may get DD5.1 audio sometimes on HD.

[tonymy01]

I only record shows that I know are HD on the Wiz. no point as you said recording HD channels when the source is SD, you may as well just record the SD channels and save some bytes on the HDD for any show which isn't HD.
And believe you and me, you CAN see a dramatic difference for HD vs SD. Shows like:
House, Supernatural, Lost, Cane, are great, even the "film grain look" CSI franchises look quite a bit better.
Studio stuff like the morning variety shows again look great, Australian Idol was a superb HD show in terms of image quality. Also the HD 20/20 cricket match was again way way better than all the others on HD which were only upscaled.
Regards

[netmask]

If it is your intention to make a DVD archive copy then you are better off selecting the SD transmission if there is one. Why? well less post processing to downscale the signal. With a couple of HDTV programs that I recorded,in order to keep sound sync after using all the usual programs, ProjectX to edit and demux, Womble to recombine and make a MPEG2 DVD conforming file, abandoned this as it was going to take 6 hours, instead I selected auto with the same rate etc. This went through very quickly in Womble and I then converted this file to Xvid using AutoGK on 100% quality setting and retaining AC3 audio. I then use this file in VSO ConvertXtoDVD. Result a good looking file with excellent sound and in sync. Trying to feed the high rate MPEG file into VSO and other authoring programs resulted in sync problems and skips etc...

So I avoid recording in HD if I intend to archive the file.

I've tried TMPGenc, Vegas , Canopus ProCoder2 and a few others but either it's just going to take too long to process or there are sound sync problems. SD transmission recordings haven't presented me with any sound sync problems, well not since I've been using ProjectX routinely.