Apparatus and method for recording digital data with a controlled data compression ratio

摘要

In step S1, the capacity of the area (remaining quantity) of a disk in which information can be recorded is read, and the remaining quantity is displayed in step S2. After a user inputs the recording time of information to be recorded and the recording capacity w for the recording, an average transmission rate R1 is calculated from expression R1=w/t- alpha in step S4. The rate alpha is the transmission rate for transmitting signals other than a video signal, such as an audio signal, attached to the video signal. Data obtained by applying a DCT treatment to the video data is quantized with a quantization width corresponding to the average transmission rate R1 and this data is intermittently recorded on the disk.