[mythtv-users] How to down convert?

[mlists at dressler.ca]

On Wednesday 26 November 2008 13:45:13 Brian Wood wrote:
> 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.

Was hoping for something that would do this on the fly.  The HD -PVR is H264 
even for the SD channels.  I don't even want to watch the HD channels per se 
just the regular channels on a secondary front end.

Norm