[mythtv-users] Encoding

Bill Williamson bill at bbqninja.com
Tue May 5 07:35:25 UTC 2009


On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 5:03 PM, Rich West <Rich.West at wesmo.com> wrote:

> I have a couple of (dozen) DVD's of TV shows that I was putting on-line
> for my mythtv setup, and I began to wonder: if these episodes are 2GB
> each and approximately 43 minutes, why is it that some of those unnamed
> on-line download places have these same episodes at approximately
> 300MB?  How do they do it yet still retain the picture quality?  How is
> it that MythTV plays it within mythvideo rather than mplayer?
>
> Those smaller files are in Xvid, typically, so I set about re-encoding
> the DVD's I had to either MP4 or Xvid to reduce the size, but I had
> mixed results.  I've got 78 episodes, so, at 2GB each, they do chew up a
> fair amount of room.  I used handbrake to convert to MP4, but while the
> picture quality was excellent and the file size was pretty decent
> (600+MB), my frontend would only play it via mplayer (which the family
> did not like).  Forcing it to play with the internal player resulted in
> extremely choppy video and audio.  I tried to convert to Xvid or DivX,
> but I couldn't seem to get the application (either on a Windows box or
> using mencoder on my mythtv server) or the options correct, so the
> playback was always choppy or the picture was grainy within Mythvideo.
>
> I must not be googling correctly, because I cannot seem to find just the
> right options that play nicely with mythtv's internal video player. Any
> pointers in the proper direction would be greatly appreciated!
>
> Thanks!
> -Rich
>
>

300M copies of "hour" (43 minute) shows look HORRIBLE.

700M copies using xvid look pretty good.
1.2G h.264 copies from an HD source outclass DVD.

I use handbrake to rip my personal DVDs using the "television" preset, but
changing audio to AC3 passthrough.  Honestly your problem may be audio, as
handbrake defaults to using AAC.  I use the mkv container with AC3, and the
default quality setting.

It comes out looking REALLY good (on my 720p screen I cannot tell the
difference between it and the original DVD) and about 600-650 megs per 40-45
minute episode.  It also keeps the surround sound, which is nice.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20090505/c03addc9/attachment.htm>


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list