[mythtv-users] Encoding to h264 to save space

[Chris Isip]

On Feb 18, 2008 10:56 PM, Ronald Frazier <ron at ronfrazier.net> wrote:

> > Oh, that's wrong. I checked the size of a movie that I thought was an
> > hour show. I go with 200MB/hour and it looks great.
>
> OK. Now THAT sounds reasonable. Here I was thinking you just had some
> REALLY high standards :-)
>
> --
> Ron
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>

Sorry, I seem to have pasted the script twice.

Its 150 MB an hour.  My existing recordings are 1.5 GB an hour before
transcoding.  I display to a 32 inch crt tv and I find it watchable.  Of
course, everyone will have different standards of "watchable".   It will
probably look horrible on any hdtv.  Its excellent on my ipod touch although
my ipod touch version is encoded with audio in  AAC, not mp3.  Low motion
scenes look better.

I would rather transcode down to 200 kbit rather than 0 kbit (delete the
file).

This is actually from an ipod video conversion script.  Quite frankly, I
think the quality could be slightly better yet so thats why I am still
refining the script.  I'm hoping to get 2 pass encoding to work.  However I
think 2 pass x264 in ffmpeg is broken.  The pass log file gets created but
it is zero length.  I might eventually settle with 250 or 300 kbit.   And I
think I will try mencoder as well.  My mencoder doesn't have h264 support
though, so I would have to recompile.

I'm currently watching a transcoded episode and noticed that even with
commercial skip off, the video would skip commercials.  I guess this is
probably the intended behavior when you do a mythcommflag gencutlist.  I
will probably remove that from the script.

So, the issue remaining is really just the video distortion with each seek
which lasts a few seconds.

If anyone has any "formulas" for x264 encoding, please share.


Thanks
Chris
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