Originally posted by: digitalfreaknyc
I couldn't disagree more. I've done a lot of recordings in both xp (1 hour) and sp (2 hour) on my recorders and the 2 hours are always worse than the one

But don't standalone DVD video recorders use fixed bitrates for recording in such modes? so you can't really compare that to encoding & burning on a PC which can do multiple pass variable bitrate encoding to ensure the picture quality stays even throughout and the bitrate is automatically upped/lowered according to the complexity of the image being encoded.