[mythtv-users] HDTV to DVD w/o decode and encode

Joe Barnhart joebarnhart at yahoo.com
Tue May 10 16:24:56 UTC 2005


I'm not alone in my search for a decent tool to archive shows
originally broadcast on HDTV onto DVD media for keeping or sharing with
others.  For example, I'm not an Elvis fan, but my friend is and I want
to give her a DVD of the recent broadcast she missed.

The show is about 16G bytes in its original 1080i presentation.  There
is a simple scaling relationship between the original format (1920x1080
MPEG2-TS) and the desired format (720x480 MPEG2-PS).  Why is there no
program that takes one MPEG2 stream and scales it by a simple fraction,
without decoding and re-encoding the MPEG structure?

Assuming that the network took some care in encoding the MPEG file for
HDTV broadcast, why not keep all the same "B frames", "I frames", and
whatever -- and just scale everything by 3/8 horizontally and 4/9
vertically to get the required DVD resolution?

I have used currently available tools to create a DVD, but with
unacceptable difficulty and mediocre results.  The best I've found so
far is using tools under Windows to process the file -- HDTVtoMPEG2 to
strip the TS into an MPEG file and Nero Vision to transcode it to DVD
format.  Running these on the Elvis program resulted in 6 hours of
computer time and produced a DVD that has "chapters" every 2GB that
cause the player to stop cold.  Nero seems to do a complete
decode/re-encode which is what takes all the time.

There has to be a better way than this!  Has anyone seen a software
solution (preferably Linux based, open source) that scales MPEG data
without decoding and re-encoding?


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