[mythtv-users] Compressing DVDs. Saving Space.

[Kevin Hulse]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2007 at 10:20:39AM +0800, Ow Mun Heng wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-06-20 at 18:48 -0700, Chris Petersen wrote:
> > Ow Mun Heng wrote:
> > > BTW, curious as to what are the "more efficient" file formats.
> > 
> > mainly, running stuff through a higher compression xvid or h.264 codec.
> >   Not really a file format, but I was feeling too lazy to go into
> > detail.  I'm not sure what makes running through transcode/ffmpeg better
> > than Myth's own encoder (it's the same as ffmpeg's), but it does seem to
> > help.  MythTV's internal player doesn't actually do h.264+mp4 very well,
> > but that's ffmpeg's fault and means that xine and mplayer are both
> > troublesome, too.
> 
> Well, I'm running out of space in my own HDs due to this and thus,
> looking for ways to "expand" storage.

	I've had good luck with divx. I use mencoder and the divx 
encoder.  I recode my stuff at a brate of 1200. It works out pretty well
for TV shows and reasonably well for movies. This is strictly for the
2nd tier movies and TV shows. I would never do divx conversions for 
anything I have the slightest interest in getting in HD.

	I shrink MPEG2 down to 25% of the original size.

	I have to do some finagle to get xine to display the converted
avi's right but it's only a minor nuissnace. I would like to crop the
bars out of my letterboxed stuff but I haven't figure that out yet. I
can't reset the aspect ratio with the divx encoder and I dont want to
use the lavc one.

	I tried h.264 but the playback speed was not good enough for
random seeking. I ended up with some freaky slow motion transform
effects going on.

[deletia]

	Oddly enough, I've found that I like the closed captions better
as subtitles (due to be extracted from the vobs into a subtitle file to
be used with the avi).