[mythtv-users] What to do with playing HD on 'normal' TV?

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Fri Mar 3 06:27:44 UTC 2006


On 03/03/2006 01:05 AM, Chad wrote:
> I've got a Home Theater that I use to watch my "shows" (CSI, Las
> Vegas...) in High Def.  I've also got several other 'regular' TV's
> floating around my house in various places.  1 of these TV's is so old
> school, I have to use an RF Modulator to get a computer to hook up to
> it via a composite output on a video card.
>
> So my question:
> What does everyone do about this?  I obviously don't need HD output on
> this 27" dinosaur, and I also don't want to have to get FX5200's for
> every Myth system I build.  Is there another option I'm overlooking? 
> Can you maintain 2 versions of the same show on the same MythTV
> network?  I would be willing to do some excellent symlinking 
...
> I'd think something more along the lines of:
> Stream to disk via HD3000, fire up mythtranscode, put transcoded file
> in seperate LD directory, and somehow get the regular frontends (not
> the HD one) to see the LD directory instead of the HD.
>   

A Myth frontend will always look for the video in its RecordFilePrefix, 
even if it was recorded by another backend.  Therefore, you could 
transcode (keeping both old and new), then move the transcoded video 
(the standard-def one) to a recordings directory that's mounted on all 
your standard-def frontends and move the original video (the high-def 
one) to have the pre-transcoding name (I think that would just mean 
removing ".old" from the filename).  The filename must be identical in 
both the HDTV and SDTV directories.

However, this gets far more complex if you have combined 
frontend/backends with HDTV capture cards and standard-def-only playback 
because you only get one recording directory per host.  So, your HDTV 
cards would be recording to the SDTV directory and you'd have to 
transcode, then move the high-def recording for those...

And, when you factor in the hours it will take to transcode each video, 
you might be better off--as long as you're not severely lacking in 
CPU--paying the $20-$40 for a 5200 for each frontend...

Best of luck with whichever approach you choose.

Mike


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