[mythtv-users] Optimum encoding for remote mythtv

Andy Kuan andy at kuan.net
Wed May 12 10:48:34 EDT 2004


I've been away from my TV too. Except in my case, I've been missing my 
Red Sox games since I've been staying in Central PA. I use nuvexport to 
transcode games down to 320kbps DivX streams at 352x240 -- around 75M 
for half an hour. Yes, it's kind of crappy looking and I can barely read 
the game stats shown on the screen, but I can catch most of the action. 
I recently wrote a quick and dirty web script that loads the commercial 
cutlist for the program so that nuvexport can skip the ads. Once I got 
that into place, most half-hour shows (in reality 20-21 minutes) came in 
around 50M.

Timothy Weaver wrote:

>
>
>About nine months ago, I setup a mythtv box. Using Jarod's instructions, I
>had no difficulty setting up mythtv running on Red Hat 9.0 using a P4 2.5
>GHz, 512MB of RAM and a PVR-250.
>
>The purpose was nothing short of survival. I currently live in Europe but
>setup the box at a friend's house in the USA so that I could record and
>download my favorite TV shows (How could I live without Curb Your
>Enthusiasm?). This has worked just fine. The only downside is that, even
>with my friend's "business" cable connection that provides about 40kbps
>upstream, downloading a 30 minute show is about 3-4 hours using my current
>encoding profile settings.
>
>Those settings are currently 720x480 with a max bitrate of 3000 and audio
>at 48000 and 96k. There is only an analog cable input to the PVR-250, so I
>am sure those settings are overkill and are making the files larger than
>they need to be for the quality I would find acceptable.
>
>My question is can someone suggest better settings? Obviously, I can test a
>variety of encoding settings but it's not so painless because I then have
>to download the file before visually inspecting it.
>
>Currently, my idea is to drop the resolution to NTSC level (approx 352x525)
>while leaving the max bitrate at 3000. Am I heading in the right direction
>with this change?
>
>Also, I would like to define the Low Quality profile for recording animated
>shows like The Simpsons or South Park. Any ideas what settings I should use
>for that?
>
>Should I look at transcoding to something other than MPEG files? If so,
>what? I know I cannot yet use the commercial cut functionality on MPEG
>files, so that will have to wait.
>
>All help, advice, feedback, criticisms, and monetary donations are
>appreciated.
>
>  
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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