[mythtv-users] Automatic onversion from MPEG-2 to H264

[David Brodbeck]

Gerald Brandt wrote:
> 2. Any hints on getting the best quality?

Two-pass will give significantly better quality than one-pass at the 
same bitrate.  If you're not in a big hurry, use two-pass.

Quality is highly subjective.  I suggest taking a short recording that's 
representative of what you watch and doing a few test encodes at 
different bitrates.  It will also depend a bit on signal quality -- 
noisier signals will need a higher bitrate, because random noise is hard 
to encode.

Consider not re-encoding the audio.  It's probably AAC, which is pretty 
good compression to start with.  I find just stream copying the audio 
tends to do a better job preserving sync.  Note that AAC audio in an AVI 
container is technically a standards violation, but MythTV plays it 
fine.  AAC audio in an MPEG4 container is valid but is kind of hit or 
miss with Myth.  I have one Myth system that plays them fine, and 
another that will play some MPEG4 AAC files but not others.