You're welcome, but one thing to keep in mind: Although TV screens are larger, the resolution is usually lower than your computer monitor. And the fact that they aren't LCD displays often makes video look better on a TV screen (at least you don't notice the imperfections as easily).
If you're converting videos to burn to single layer discs, I'm not sure you can do anything to improve the quality since you're keeping it in DVD format.
to your first question, it shows up as a DVD-RAM drive because it's capable of writing to RAM discs. a lot of drives aren't. so it shows RAM because it's more special than just +-RW discs. at least thats what I think they chose to have it display that. my matsushita drive is the same.
to the second question, every once in a while my drive shows cd writer or blank CD when i put a disc in and it has trouble reading or using the drive. i usually just restart or disable/enable the drive to fix it. then it reads discs right again. being an external, I don't know what you can do since I'm sure you've tried unplugging it already.
I don't have a tuner card so I don't know much about what's available for that, but if you can't convert it straight to divx when you record the shows, then I doubt you can automate recoding to divx afterwards. The closest thing to doing it automatically is batch converting all the shows you save at a later date.. but I've never heard of a program that will wait for a file to appear then convert it.
Encoding movies to DVD-Video format, which is set, requires them to adhere to the DVD video standards. This means you have to encode with mpeg2 at a specified resolution. So the length of the movie becomes the determining factor for how many movies fit on a disc, rather than how large the original file size is. You can fit maybe 4 hours on a single layer DVD in Long Play or Extra Long play modes, and the quality will poorer than the original file.
So it depends on the length of the videos. You may be able to fit three movies on one single layer disc but you'd pay with quality.
You can use FairUse wizard, or any of the others mentioned in the downloads section to rip DVD to H.264.
I would recommend paying the $20? to get the add-on, since Mpeg2 is a very common format (so there are a lot of options for encoding to it), and H.264 has much better quality than wmv for higher bitrate videos.
I was waiting for the Cowon A3 to come out so I didn't have to buy the H.264 add-on for the Archos
Well we're in the DVD>VCD forum, so if you're creating VCDs split the movie in half and make each 700mb. Otherwise, using a 2.5 instead of 1 hour movie, to keep the same quality make it 1150Mb or so.
do you have one core with hyperthreading or similar feature, or actually two cores? I have one core with hyperthreading, and I noticed if I set divx encoding quality from insane quality to speedy the processor usage appears to go up. there is also a "advanced hyperthreading" feature (or something) in the divx encoding settings.
but if you just have HT, then you can't really make it go any higher without lowering quality. HT only works at all in some situations.
Dual layer means twice as much data, which means twice as long or twice as good quality video. The discs are more expensive, but you don't have to recompress DL movies to fit on single layer discs. So no quality lost and less time spent.
There is no set length when you have to start using Dual layer discs.
FairUse Wizard with Divx works, and if you're doing TV shows the Light Edition will work fine since episodes will stay short and the 700mb cap won't affect you. Or if you're saving them to CDs.
I've never used it, but there's RatDVD as well. You can retain the menus and such, which may be a nice alternative to ripping tons of episodes of shows. you could do this if you're storing on an external.
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