[mythtv-users] Best settings for transcoding HD content to save space?

[Steve Boyer]

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 1:39 PM, Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com> wrote:
> On 5/13/2014 1:55 PM, Steve Boyer wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 12:40 PM, Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 5/13/2014 1:21 PM, Eric Sharkey wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 7:50 PM, Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> On 5/12/2014 6:52 PM, Ben Kamen wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I've been looking at my drive space wondering if I can trim down
>>>>>> per/show usage by good transcoding settings.
>>>>>
>>>>> You're best off just performing lossless cutting and being done with
>>>>> it.
>>>>> Disk space is cheap.  Transcoding takes time.
>>>>
>>>> It's not really a one size fits all situation, from my point of view.
>>>
>>>
>>> Unless you need to fit within certain device or network constraints, such
>>> as
>>> use on a mobile device with limited storage or playback support, or
>>> streaming over the internet, you're best off with the original (or the
>>> original minus ads).  PC storage is sufficiently cheap and trivial to add
>>> that cutting your ~4GB MPEG2 recordings down to 1.5-2GB H264 isn't worth
>>> it.
>>
>> Just something to point out: 8 GB recordings of OTA HD recordings
>> regularly compress down to less than 1 GB. The 2x-3x file size
>> reduction that you claim is far from the 8x reduction I normally see.
>
>
> 2-3x is the generally accepted compressibility improvement of H264 over
> MPEG2.  8x results in a significant loss in quality.

Oh, no arguments here that there's a large loss in quality when doing
any lossy transcoding, not to mention at those bitrates! I can tell
the loss in quality - my wife cannot however. Just saying that if you
can tolerate a higher loss in quality, the file sizes are even better.

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