[mythtv-users] Transcode blues...

[Michael Tiller]

I've never used transcoding in MythTV (automatic or otherwise) but because I
recently got an HDHomerun I am now dealing with two issues that, it would
seem, would benefit from transcoding.

The first is that I can now get HD.  For the time being, I cannot view HD
(still working on XvMC, etc but no joy so far).  What I'd like to do in the
meantime is trancode things down.  I thought this would be simple.  Just
setup a transcoding profile (I used the High Quality one) to transcode to
720x480.  I used a bit rate around 3800 and left pretty much everything else
the same.  I used this to transcode an HD program.  The results were
terrible.  First, the file size went from 7Gb to 6.6Gb.  This despite the
fact that I was transcoding from MPEG2 to MPEG4?!?  The picture quality was
pretty bad (in spite of this) and, finally, the playback was jerky.  This
seems like such a straightforward thing, how did I screw it up?

The second is that I can now get SD broadcasts as well.  However the audio
is AC3.  Unfortunately my MediaMVPs can't play this (even though mvpmc says
it supports AC3).  So I thought I would simply do some kind of MPEG2->MPEG2
transcoding switching the audio to MP3.  But this doesn't seem to be an
option.  If I want to transcode it seems like I can only trancode to MPEG4
or RTJpeg (?).  But those won't play on the Media MVP.  Am I correct in
saying that there is no support for MPEG2->MPEG2 trancoding?  I could swear
I've seen people talk about that before?!?  Ideally I'd like lossless video
trancode (i.e. strictly AC3->MP3 transcoding).

Oh yes, and lastly I would like to try and save space by transcoding some of
the movies I have down in MPEG2 to MPEG4.  I've tried this with mixed
results.  Often the transcoding bombs out with an error status of 0 (is that
an error status?!?) or 255.  Where do I look to find out more details about
why the failure occurred?  Also, while successful commercial flaggings
appear in the jobs queue window in MythWeb, it doesn't show successful
transcodings (only unsuccessful ones) which makes me a big nervous.

Any pointers would be very much appreciated.  Thanks.

--
Mike
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