[mythtv-users] nuvexport/transcode settings survey for acceptable quality

[Jonathan Markevich]

Matt Vollmar wrote:

> I would like to take a quick survey to find out what settings you guys 
> find acceptable for exporting movies.  I have several (16 or so) 
> movies that I want to export to a smaller format to save space.  Here 
> are my questions:
>
> 1)  What format do you use to retain the most quality?
> 2)  What bitrates for video and audio?
> 3)  Do you use 2-pass or 1-pass?
> 4)  Any gotchas?
> 5)  What is the size you get per hour of video?
>
> I've learned quite a bit about ffmpeg recently for DVD-quality 
> exports, but i don't really want these movies to be that big.  I would 
> like to fit 4 movies per DVD if possible (not necessarily in MPEG 
> format -- I'm using Movix).
>
> Thanks for any comments you can offer.


Well I've been experimenting a lot with the modules, and I get very good 
quality out of using ffmpeg with the -b 1152 -vcodec mpeg1video -s 
352x240 -hq -qmax 3 -qmin 13 -ar 44100 -aspect 4:3 and that gets me 
about 300 MB per hour, while being fairly VCD compliant.  I like this 
very much because it encodes at 70-100fps.

It was more work though, because I had to copy the WMV.pm module to 
MPG.pm, change these params (plus the other obvious ones), then make it 
visible to nuvexport itself.  Hopefully I can send this off to Chris and 
he can test it out for me and point out dumb errors.

I am also experimenting with the KVCD matrix, which works well, but I 
can't change the framerate without it being slightly jumpy, nor resizing 
something that isn't already 352x240.  Maybe Chris or some other guru 
can help me out with that.