MB/GB size of TV show?

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generally speaking, how big (in megabytes or gigabytes) would an entire season of a TV show be? Each episode being 48 +/- minutes long and about 20-30 episodes per season.

I'm wondering if I could fit an entire season of Stargate or Battlestar Galactica on a 32 GB iPod.

Also, would it help if I reduced the size of each episode down to what the resolution of the device is with whatever video software that's out there? I mean, a movie 320x### would have to be much smaller in memory size than a movie in 1280x####, right?

I would aim for about (meaning at least) 500 MB per 48 minute episode for something like sci-fi/action, otherwise you end up with too much blockiness in fast motion scenes.

If you have the season DVD's here's what I suggest. Go download Handbrake: http://www.handbrake.fr and use that to encode each episode in h264 using the ipod presets. This will get pretty much the highest quality per bit you can squeeze out while still being simple enough so that the ipod doesn't choke playing it back.

You can either fiddle with the bitrate (or constant quality settings) or you can divide 31 GB (give some extra room) by however many episodes there are in order to get how big you can make each episode, then put that in under target size. Remember to check turbo first pass so that it pre-scans the file so it can hit the target size better.

Depends on the show: (length, compression)
The entire season of ping pong club- 8gb (anime)

(27 mkv episodes)

Season 1 and 2 of twin peaks - 11 gb - also avi format but longer episodes
(each episode 300mb +)

Wonder Showzen season 1 - 1,38 gb - avi format
Wonder Showzen season 2 - 1,38 gb

1 DVD = 4 GB

DVD resolution is 720x480, iPod resolution is 320x240.

So the DVD is 4 1/2 times the screen size.

Probably about 1GB per DVD, so it would certainly fit.

A bit more complicated than that...

For one thing a lot of commercial pressed DVDs are dual-layer meaning 8 GB per disk (though in practice most disks never use more than 6 or 7 GB of that)

Another is that the ipod can use vastly more efficient coding. DVDs are limited to MPEG-2 encoding whereas (at least newer) ipods can use h264 encoding which gives some more quality per bitrate.

Conclusion, it will fit. Especially if you use handbrake and specify the target file size to be what it needs to be to fit. If the files have to be shrunk too much, you will get quality suffering especially on fast action scenes. But it will fit regardless.

Probaly around 7-8 GB,

digger, you can fit four seasons
just go to mininova dot org and avoid the hassle of converting your own dvds