[mythtv-users] Converting HDTV to SDTV

[Adam Siegel]

I just replaced my PVR350 with a pair of AVerTVHD MCE A180s in preparation
for the HDTV deadline.  Yes, I use an antenna - no cable here.  Having two
cards is great as I can record more than one program at a time.  I had very
few problems with their install, thanks to this forum.  They are working
perfectly.

My front-end units on a couple of the televisions in the house are Hauppauge
MediaMVPs.  I've used the mvpmc distro for a couple of years now without any
issues.  However, these units can't process the 1920x1080 mpeg2 stream (not
to mention network bandwidth issues).  So I need to transcode the
recordings.

I can't seem to get a good read on what to use and the paramters for the
various programs.  I have tried both mencoder and ffmpeg.

The first thing I do is check to see what resolution the recording is by
doing

$w = `mplayer -nosound -vo null -ss 03:00:00 -really-quiet -identify $F1
2>/dev/null | grep ID_VIDEO_WIDTH`;

in a perl script.  If the width is less than 720, the the MediaMVPs seem to
work fine and no transcoding is necessary.  However if it's greater than 720
I transcode with ffmpeg

ffmpeg -i $F1 -croptop 12 -target ntsc-dvd $F2

I needed to add the croptop because there is some noise that I get in the
recording (don't know why).

Anyway, with ffmpeg I have noticed some voice sync problems with the
MediaMVP.  The picture looks fine.  Playback on a PC using either the ASX
stream from MythWeb or using MythTVPlayer on widows is fine.

Appreciate any advise available for a better transcoding method!!!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20090128/b0575f6f/attachment.htm>