I know there are trade-offs between the raw MPEG-2 OTA quality and what you can squeeze through your transcoders and then to the USB 2.0-connected disk in real-time… but watching events with lots of noisy details really destroys picture quality on the big screen.
For instance… the other night I watched Penn & Teller “Fool Us” (on a 720p 40" LED). That stage show has all kinds of lights, sparkles, mirrors, flashes, confetti, etc. Those little “noisy” details play havok with the picture quality. When things calm down, the picture looks pretty stock.
I’d love to see some further optimization for quality. I’d like to see fewer compression artifacts around high-contrast things like text. I’d like to see more of the fine details preserved in fast motion (knowing that MPEG-2 has already lost a lot of that).
This is me asking you to overcome the physics and realities of real-time encoding. Make it so.