[mythtv-users] MPEG4 bigger than MPEG2?

[Andrew Leech]

On 9/03/2012 4:50 PM, Raymond Wagner wrote:
> On 3/9/2012 00:41, Ross Boylan wrote:
>> On Thu, 2012-03-08 at 23:56 -0500, Raymond Wagner wrote:
>>> On 3/8/2012 22:51, Ross Boylan wrote:
>>>> Hi, everyone.  I'm a new user, and am wondering why transcoding is
>>>> making my files bigger.  More specifically, I think I have transcoded a
>>>> file from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4, and it got a little bigger (3.1 vs 2.9GB).
>>> It's all a function of bitrate.  MythTV will not automatically choose an
>>> 'ideal' bitrate for you, it will use what you tell it to.  If the
>>> bitrate you told it to use is larger than the bitrate you recorded it
>>> as, you will end up with a larger file.
>> How can I tell what  bitrate a recording is at?
> file size (in bytes) / duration of recording (in seconds) * 8
>
I'm pretty sure the new player stats gives you this info:
while the video is playing, bring up the osd menu (sorry don't know what 
key it normally is by default, might just be 'm') and under video menu I 
think, there's an item at the bottom called playback stats.

Or from a command line with ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i filename.nuv
or mplayer
mplayer -ao dummy -vo dummy -identify filename.flv

Andrew