[mythtv-users] PVR-250 Question

[Jason Lindquist]

On Aug 25, 2004, at 10:11 AM, John P. Mitchell wrote:

>    I am currently using a BT878 based TV card. No hardware encoding. I 
> am
> currently software encoding to MPEG4 and MP3 so that one hour of
> recording comes in at about 1GB of disk and around 700MB after
> commercials are cut. I would like to be able to export this video out
> of the NUV format into something I could burn to CD and watch on my Mac
> or on my Windows XP laptop.

That should be playable on either platform with the right codecs 
installed.  Have you tried exporting a program with no transcoding and 
playing it in QuickTime Player?

>    The biggest problem for me is the export time. It takes around 45
> minutes to export a half hour show that has a commerial cut list, which
> is like 23 minutes of actual material. So it takes twice as long and it
> really hammers the CPU of my Myth machine, so much so that I can not do
> much else on the machine.

Yup.  MPEG-2 encoding is very CPU-intensive.  There's no way around 
this without a hardware solution.  Unless you *need* the material as 
MPEG-2 (say, if you want to burn a DVD that will play in a standalone 
DVD player) I wouldn't recommend transcoding.

-- 
Jason Lindquist  <*>  "And in a country whose revolutionary agenda is
linky at see.figure1.net  defined by free speech, the people's ability to
KB9LCL                 ask informed questions should be enshrined by a
                        President, not vilified."  -- Warren Ellis