[mythtv] If you use the transcoder please read

[J.D. Bakker]

</lurk>

>In the future there will be multiple transcoder profiles.  There are two
>ways to go about this:
>1) There is a transcoder profile that maps to each of 'High', 'Low',
>'Default', and 'TV'.  This is equivalent to there being a Transcoder
>profile group.  Any recording done at 'High' regardless of the card will
>be transcoded with the 'High' transcoder settings.
>
>2) Each card-type has a transcoder profile.  This means that all PVR
>cards will use the same transcoder settings, regardless of what the
>recording settings are.

I for one would prefer option 1. IMHO it makes more sense from an 
user POV, as it offers a 'quality' abstraction for the myriad of 
card/codec/bitrate tunables.

As an example, I currently use the auto-expire feature to keep the 
last dozen or so news broadcasts. This would be an ideal candidate 
for the 'Low' profile, and I would probably set it to auto-transcode 
after recording. The advantage is that this gives predictable disk 
usage and quality *regardless of which capture card the scheduler 
happened to pick*. In this case, I'd want my news broadcasts to 
always end up as 576x576 1500Kb/s MPEG-4 files.

Maybe I'm alone in using the transcoder to hide the hardware details 
of a heterogeneous set of capture cards, but I think it's one of its 
niftiest applications (especially combined with profile groups).

JDB
[on a semi-related note, would it be possible to attach a 'card 
scheduling order' to each profile group ? I'd like to have the news 
stuff recorded by my old bttv card, so my PVR250 is free for Live TV. 
For movies it's the other way round]
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