[mythtv-users] Large-scale myth farm

[Martin Bene]

Hi,

> 'Reference copies' may be a misleading term to those outside
> the broadcasting/archiving world. They're the lowest quality,
> intended only for viewing to find material. They're currently
> being done on VHS, some on long play - the space saving (and
> faster fetching from tape library backend) of mpeg4 will
> probably be much more valuable than the loss of quality.

Ok, definitely a misunderstanding there. Yes, given this explanation
transcoding to mpeg4 would make sense.

You'll want to take the additional I/O bandwidth required for
transcoding into account. 

What's the situation wrt commercials for the channels you're interested
in recording? i.e do you have commercial breaks during the programs.
 
The reason I'm asking: if commercials are tagged in the recordings, they
can be cut out during the transcoding process, saving space and
resulting in a recording with only the content you actually want. So it
makes sense to first manually check/mark the recordings before
transcoding if that's a feature you want to use.

If you've got "clean" recordings that don't have commercials in the
first place, you can skip this and have mythtv transcode automaticaly.

> 'scuse my ignorance - what's a CI module?
Common Interface. That's a standardized interace required for reception
of encrypted content; Needed here in austria since ORF (austrian
national TV) is transmitted via Sat. in encrypted format because of
licensing issues; looks like a PCMCIA slot. Different encryption systems
require different modules. For ORF, the crypto system is called
"cryptoworks", so you plug a module supporting that standard into the CI
slot. ORF provides a smartcard to registered users, and that smartcard
fits into the cryptoworks module.

As stated above, that's is only required for encrypted transmissions.   

Bye, Martin