[mythtv-users] BBC HD stream with latest MPlayer-1.0pre8

[David Watkins]

On 19/06/06, Wander Winkelhorst <w.winkelhorst at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/19/06, David Watkins <watkinshome at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 19/06/06, Neil Sedger <mythtv-users at moley.org.uk> wrote:
> > > The latest MPlayer release - 1.0pre8 posted 11th June including the
> > > latest ffmpeg - plays the BBC's 1080i test stream downloaded from
> > > somewhere (featuring Attenborough and a storm).
> >
> > Does this mean than mencoder will be able to transcode it into mpeg2?
> > If so, any tips on how to do so would be very welcome.
>
>  Well, as far as I know, the general rule is: if MPlayer can play it,
> Mencoder can read it and encode to a other format.
>
> I never encode to MPEG2, but this should work for encoding it to MPEG4. I'm
> sure encoding to MPEG2 won't be very different:
>
> mencoder -mc 0 -oac mp3lame -lameopts mode=0:abr:br=160 -ovc lavc -lavcopts
> vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2000 -o "$OUTPUTFILE" -quiet "$INPUTFILE"
>

I substitued 'mpeg4' with 'mjpeg' and successfully transcoded the
sample BBC 1080i clip I dowloaded from here

http://www.giusberto.ch/hdtv/

(I presume it's the same one mentioned by the OP, since it also
features David Attenborough and a storm)

into something that plays full speed with picture and sound on my AMD
64 3000.  However I have much still to understand.  For one thing the
transcoded clip is smaller than the original (40MB vs 50MB), so either
I've lost some of the quality or I didn't get to the end of the clip,
and I have yet to repeat the success with any of the clips that I've
captured off my Nova-T card.

On I go.

Thanks for the help.