[mythtv-users] Encoding to h264 to save space

Chris Pinkham cpinkham at bc2va.org
Fri Feb 22 03:34:48 UTC 2008


* On Thu Feb 21, 2008 at 10:22:57PM -0500, Richard Freeman wrote:
> It seems like 80% of my transcoding frustrations are the result of the 
> internal player.  I really appreciate the great system that mythtv is, 
> but I'm not quite sure why they decided to write their own 
> players/transcoders/etc instead of using mplayer/xine-lib/whatever. 

Because our versions work the way we want and aren't subject to outside
changes.

> Video that plays just fine in mplayer/xine doesn't work at all in 
> mythtv.  So I just use mythvideo if I have to play it and lose the 
> ability to bookmark, commercial-skip, etc.

I think you just answered your own question.  With those external apps,
you'd lose all the features that our internal player supports.

> I've been trying for over a year now to transcode HD video to SD while 
> keeping the AC3 soundtrack in place.  I've yet to find a set of settings 
> that works reliably with seeking.  Just about anything I try works fine 
> in mplayer though.  I don't have a frontend capable of playing HD but I 
> am interested in capturing it anyway just so that I can get the AC3 
> surround tracks...

I've successfully tested a hack to do just what you're looking for,
I transcoded from mpeg-ps containing MPEG-2 video and AC3 audio down to
a .nuv file containing MPEG-4 video and the original AC3 audio.  This was
a hack test on top of another large modification I'm working on to modify
the software recorder to support multiple file formats and additional
codecs.  Don't expect this in SVN anytime soon, but it it something
that's on my TODO.  I much prefer the original AC3 audio to reencoded MP3
in the files that I do transcode.

--
Chris


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