[mythtv-users] How to down convert?

[Brian Wood]

On Wednesday 26 November 2008 11:28:26 Rod Smith wrote:
> On Wednesday 26 November 2008 08:41:57 am mlists at dressler.ca wrote:
> > I have a dual-core frontend/backend with the hd-pvr working great.  No
> > problems with watching TV on it.
> >
> > The problem I have is watching TV from other frontends that are less
> > powerful. I have a single core frontend with a basic nvidia card but I
> > can't watch hd- pvr channels without a large quantity of pre-buffer
> > pauses and studdering.
> >
> > Regular mpeg2 video plays fine on these front-ends.  Is there a way to
> > down- convert the video so I can play it as live tv?
>
> You can transcode the HD content to a lower resolution. This has the
> obvious drawback that you'll lose the HD-ness of the original. If you want
> to have both, AFAIK the only solution is to go outside of MythTV to
> transcode the recording to a lower resolution in the videos directory while
> keeping the original. There are various ways to do this, mostly involving
> ffmpeg or mencoder. You may be able to use one of the "user job"
> post-processing options to run a script to do this from the MythTV
> interface, but I've never looked into this option in any detail.

Perhaps you could transcode to MPEG2, which your frontends could play with 
less horsepower. You could also use XvMC to get some help with the MPEG2 
files, which you can't do with the h264 files from the 1212. This might at 
least preserve the original resolution.

-- 
beww
beww at beww.org