as much as I despise the recompression of content from Directv and Dish, the problem is that the majority of consumers don't care about quality, they want quantity.
with regards to the original question, I'm not an expert on video but I believe there is a Hdr bit rate and the actual avg bit rate. As I believe you are referring to the former, I recently recorded something with a Hdr bit rate of 65Mbps
I don't know much about video either, and I'm not familiar with the Hdr term, but I have seen reference to something like target bitrates and actual bitrates (not actual terms, just what I was told the meaning was) in the TSREADER output, that usually didn't differ too much. But there is also a variable bitrate, where the actual bitrate depends on the content. The old 4.2.0 CBS 32362 SR signals were variable bitrate video I think. You'd see the bitrate change from something around 40 mbps when there was active video down to almost nothing when they had a blank screen up during commercials. Channels like PBS keep the same bitrate whether there is action or test pattern up. The Dishnet HD channels seem to vary a LOT, even with content. I have seen DN MPEG4 HD with bitrates less than 1 mbps and I've seen it greater than 15 mbps too, so their quality can be anything from terrible to fairly good.
Thing that still interests me is that NET Huskervision channel. I can't remember the exact bitrate, but I think it was up around 38 mbps, even though I assume that it's source must have been from one of those AMC21 17 mbps feeds, and if so, that kind of shows that the video bitrate isn't the only parameter affecting the eventual quality.
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I think the best equipment for recording high bitrate feeds is a PC fitted with a DVB-S (or S2) tuner card. Now that DVBWorld has blind scan on their card, I'm going that route.
As for Pizza HD, I was recently informed by one of their sales zombies that their PQ is better than Blu-Ray. After nearly biting a hole in my tongue, all I could do was stare at him and say, "Really?"
I agree relative to recording via PC card tuner. At least if you're using a program like TSREADER, you don't have to worry about the overhead of displaying the video, so that even a slow computer can record very fast video. I hope that TSREADER comes out with a source for that DVBWorld card, because I'd rather give up blind scan than give up TSREADER.
Re the Pizza HD being better than Blu-Ray, don't forget that Blu-Ray varies in quality too. My wife gave me a couple Blu-Ray disks as gifts a while back, and on one, which was a recording of a cable channel program, the quality looked like it was a SD TV program upconverted to Blu-Ray bitrates. The 2nd disk was a Blu-Ray version of a movie that I already had on DVD. This one was slightly better than the SD DVD version, but not by much.
I'm sure that there are BR disks out there that are fantastic, but I can also testify that there are some that are of worse quality than even the DN HD. Also, HD of almost ANY bitrate can look quite good if there is little or no motion in the content, so how well the video looks depends a lot on the content. If you're watching a sporting event with a lot of motion, then you need a lot of bitrate, but if your're watching an old movie with very little motion, then a low bitrate version can look as good as a high bitrate version.
