Thanks in advance to anyone who has the patience to answer my questions
1) I recently purchased a skystar2 pci (drivers releae 4.4.1) board which is shipped with DVBviewer. It works fine enough on my double feed dual LNB (astra and hotbird). The only problem is that I use it a lot to record films which I later clean from spots and trascode to DIvX to enrich my history of cinema collection. Well I discovered that those large mpeg files are unmanageable by usual trimmer and transcoder software - which with standard mpeg work perfectly. So I think this is due to the mpeg compressor used by skistar to record - or by dvbviewer to record? - My computer has already all the codecs deriving from k-lite mega codec pack but dbviewer wants to use its own codec giving me only the chance to use a PS (mpeg format) or a PES (pva format) It says it does that ecause of better performance. The first times i tried to process my mpeg recordings with my trimmers it somehow worked after a few trials. but since a couple of days whether I give as input a large or a small file every trimmer trascoder will crash. Do you think this is due to the peculiarity fo this non standard mpeg compressore ro to the fact that I shoul register within a certain date the third party codec?
Anyway I don't like a recording system which works only high quality definition. Normally each stand alone equipment lets you record mpeg files even in middle, low or very low quality depending on one's needs; why isb't that possible on satellite boards?. Therefore I would like to know in advance if using progdvb would solve in part my problem. can it encode with standard codencs which don't need any registration?
2) Furthermore i found dvbviewer good enough but the information was poor in the manual. Does a standard pdf manual exist for progdvb. I couldn't find it in internet.
3) If I go for progdvb which version works more stable with skistar 4.4.1?
4) given the same quality and signal level, why german channels on astra look so incredibly better than italian channels on hotbird?
5) Where can I learn more about the basics of DVB and mpeg echnology. is there some pdf for newbies? For instance those adhoc mpeg codecs are necessary even to see images from bradcasting or only to record them.
Thanks again

- 1.)
Recordings consists of the streams, exactly as they are transmitted, then packed into a file container.
Neither DVBViewer nor ProgDVB would change anything on the streams.
Codecs are not involved at recording.
Reasons for introduction of PVA were two:
Ye ol' SS1 premium cards (with DSP and TV out) had special hardware support for that file packing as well. Though, these days all DVB software works better than that.
Second was, the usual media players could not handle transport streams directly those days, that are unconstrained, and were even failing due to too high header info on data rate (that can principally not be known in ahead due to VBR) and time codes never starting at zero.

Some issues still exist, if recording to .mpg, but for very fast reworking of those there are nice free tools like PVAStrumento or ProjectX, for example.
With / after having used those, even DVD authoring should be no problem at all.

- 2.)
Sorry, no idea.
This is all we have:
http://progdvb.com/manual.html

- 3)
Depends.
Of course, each complex software contains hidden bugs, and each try to fix one may bring new ones.
Basically, it's no problem to install different versions into individual folders, and compare.
Bug reports are to be found right here. Many of that reports later turned out to be either misunderstandings or local issues (like US providers using special EPG, name tables and alike).
Regarding hardware compatibility, requirements and options, you will find a basic history on both download pages, too.

- 4.) Data rate / compression quality issues, mainly.
If pressing twenty signals onto a transponder, quality must suffer.

- 5.)
Try wikipedia, to get started.

Codecs are NOT necessary / used for recording, as already mentioned above. Though, extremely hungry codecs / codecs' internal settings may overload your CPU and by this cause recordings to drop some stream data.
Of course you need codecs to watch, both in the DVB application and in any external player as well.
Codec packs normally are no good idea, as they many ruin your DirectShow system completely.
You may want to find a filter manager like radlight.

Try to find a codec, that's getting some hardware support from your VGA card. Perhaps that's available from the software bundle, that came with it, or an update for this.

Thank you very much jürgen; I'll meditate your words. I was used to the output formats of TV hard disk recorders which seem to be fa more stable to process with editing software. Thank you again I'try the software you mentioned