[mythtv-users] PVR recordings to DVD

[creator at inreach.com]

Yep, I've played with droping the rate on the card but Myth really doesn't 
like it and I don't like the reduced quality. 

I've been semi- secussfull in transcoding the myth files to be more compressed 
so that I don't loose out on quality but gain more video on the disk.  I'm 
still fighting with some choppyness issues introduced by the transcode, but 
it may have been my fault to begin with and will find out soon.  Here's the 
command I'm trying right now that seems to give good output, and takes about 
four hours to re-encode a one hour show (on a amd 1700+) and the final 
output, once multiplexed, takes about 1.4 gig.

transcode -i $1 -x mpeg2 -o $1 -m $1 -y mpeg2enc,mp2enc -F 8 -z -k -w 3600

to use this in the script I posted, it replaces the two tcextract commands and 
replace the $1.m2a with $1.mpa on the tcmplex line.

I've been hoping that I don't need to tell it to do multiple passes (for speed 
considerations) but it may be necessary if my last tweak to the command 
options doesn't fix the slight choppyness.

Thanks for the input.

-Robert

On Friday 27 June 2003 13:09, Justin Mayfield wrote:
> 3.6GB /hr sounds like 8Mbit avg 16Mbit peak settings, which are the
> defaults for the ivtv driver.  I assume you are using this;  Just send
> the ioctl via "test_ioctl" to turn the bit rate down to a lower level,
> and you can easily double, triple, quad, etc the amount of video per
> disc based on your willingness to accept lower quality.
>
> JM
>
> On Tue, 2003-06-24 at 09:56, creator at inreach.com wrote:
> > Hay all, I've been playing around with getting the mpeg2 recordings
> > produced by my PVR through myth to be recognized by dvdauthor so I can
> > burn them to a dvd without going through a transcode process...  and I've
> > finally got something that works!  So, I thought that i'd share...
> >
> > Here's the key... For some reason, dvdauthor will not recognize the
> > recordings, so they must be ran through transcode at some point to fix
> > them up a little.  The way I found that was to use the transcode utilites
> > to demux and then remux the file, but never running a full transcode
> > process.  This way the whole process is really fast (disk bound) but you
> > will need to have some spare space lying around.
> >
> > Here's my simple test script...
> >
> > #!/bin/bash
> > tcextract -i $1 -x mp3 > $1.m2a
> > tcextract -i $1 -x mpeg2 > $1.m2v
> > tcmplex -i $1.m2v -p $1.m2a -o $1.vob -m d
> > rm -f $1.m2v $1.m2a
> > mkdir testing
> > dvdauthor -o testing -t $1.vob
> > rm -f $1.vob
> > dvdauthor -o testing -T
> > mkisofs -dvd-video -o testing.iso testing/
> > rm -rf testing
> >
> > And it seems to work!  I've burned the output iso to a DVD-RW and played
> > it in my sony dvd player and it works great!  The only downfall is that
> > the compression on the file sucks and it takes nearly a full disk for
> > only an hour of video (3.6 gig).  This is of course with myth set to
> > record at 720x480 at it's max bitrate with the stream type set to 10
> > (dvd).
> >
> > My next project is to try to find an effient way to re-encode these to
> > have better compression so I can fit two hours onto a dvd-r (like we can
> > currently with our tivo recordings) and to chop commericals out (but that
> > may just be a pipe dream).
> >
> > If anyone else has this working or has a different method you're working
> > on, please let me know.
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > Robert Stellhorn
> > creator at inreach.com
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