Recording Quality Settings

For Provideo Cards

SageRecorder and SageTV use 'parameter' and 'header' files to determine the quality settings for video encoding. The different settings available are determined by the files in the 'Parameters' directory in the ‘Common’ folder of your installation.

Any new files you put in the parameter directory will be added as an option in SageRecorder (right-click the encoding button to see all the options). These files only specify the video encoding parameters. The audio encoding parameters are separately configurable in SageRecorder under audio properties.

For SageTV, you also need to put the parameter & header files in the Parameters directory; but you also need to add a line to the Sage.properties file for the option to show up in SageTV. Here's an example of one of these lines in the properties file:
seeker/recording_qualities/Great=Great(Ntsc),384,48000,4444444

"Great" is the name that will show up in SageTV for the quality option. Don't use any spaces or non-alphanumeric characters for the name unless you understand using the backslash to do escape sequences.
"Great(Ntsc)" refers to the parameter (.par) & header (.hdr) filenames for this quality settings
"384" is the audio bitrate in kbps
"48000" is the audio sampling rate
"4444444" is the overall bitrate of the entire stream in bits/second

Creating the parameter & header files is done using a tool called parEditor which is available from: http://www.frontiernet.net/~jfss/