[mythtv-users] Transcoding all recordings to h.265

[George Bingham]

On Fri, Jun 4, 2021 at 8:56 AM Ryan Patterson <ryan.goat at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, May 24, 2021 at 10:29 AM Fred Hamilton <fred at yonkitime.com> wrote:
>
>> I've been using MythTV for 13 years, but never looked into transcoding,
>> partly because I didn't want any quality loss, but also because most people
>> seemed to be using it to create smaller files with the commercials cut out,
>> and from normal watching I found commercial detection to be amazing but not
>> reliable that I would trust it not to delete actual content.  (Although it
>> looks like it might be much better nowadays - I watched SNL [usually a real
>> challenge] last night and it did a flawless job.)
>>
>> But what I'd like to do now is transpose all of my multi-terabyte
>> recording collection from .ts to h.265 mp4 (or similar), hopefully keeping
>> the commercials in but keeping the commercial cutlist (although maybe it
>> wouldn't be a bad idea to re-detect all the commercials with the latest
>> algorithm).
>>
>> Is that doable from within MythTV?
>>
>
> In the past people have presented arguments that it was actually more
> expensive to pay for the electricity to transcode recordings smaller, and
> cheaper to spend the same amount to buy larger hard drives.  I'm not sure
> what the math says is the optimal solution these days.
> _____________
> Ryan Patterson
> May the wings of liberty never lose a feather.
>
>
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I've never had luck with mythtv's built in transcoding feature. I've tried
it up to in v31, but have not tried in v32. However I wanted to do
something similar for shows I wanted to keep / archive, which nowadays is a
small percentage of recorded content.

Generally for a show I want to keep, I will edit the commercial skips so
they are accurate, and usually watch the original recording at least once
to make sure all the cuts are correct. If I still want to save it, I have a
job setup to save it, one for movies and one for tv shows - they're a
little different because for movies I want to keep I don't want any
reduction in recording quality, but for tv shows where my goal is to
archive a whole season at a time, I compromise and reduce from 1080 to 720,
I also include season and episode numbers in the naming scheme.

I run that job against only select recordings. They're stored so they
appear under the Videos section in mythtv.

What you are proposing where you want to transcode the whole recording, but
keep the skip list intact probably won't work. At least I've never been
able to make that work because transcoding usually removes or invalidates
the seektable. You may be able to regenerate a new seek table on the
transcoded recordings, but then I would think you'd have to re-run
commercial flagging, and I don't know if that'd work on a file that's not
an mpeg2 recording. Although I guess I don't really know if that's the case.

Also the other respondent may be correct in that the amount of time and
resources you spend on getting all your recordings transcoded may  be worth
more than the expense of buying additional storage.
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