[mythtv-users] transcoding a bunch of files

[Christopher Meredith]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 2:10 PM, Richard Morton
<richard.e.morton at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a bunch of video files that I have created over a long period of
> time.... with camcorders with tape, digital camcorders, various tuner cards,
> ripping of discs to various qualities and codecs...  they are of varying
> nature...
>
> I now want to use only the internal mythtv player to keep a consistent UI
> and keys (I know I can map the keys of Xine also)...
>
> So, Myth doesnt play them all and I have been looking at various ways of
> transcoding to H264 (ideally)
>
> I know there will be some transcoding loss; I can live with that... what I
> want to do is point a script at a directory of files and let it get on with
> transcoding. The rules of the script would be the following:
>  - The script should re-transcode only the files not using H264
>  - The script should not change the resolution
>  - The audio should stay in the number of channels that is there currently;
> if it is uncompressed then change to AAC, if compressed in MP3 or M4A leave
> it alone...
>  - keep the file to be roughly the same size (within a couple of MB) or
> smaller if quality can be maintained.
>
> I have looked at Mencoder, FFMPEG, VLC and I cant get even one file to come
> out as I want... so I am turning to the experts... you.
>
> thanks in advance.

I have a couple scripts that could be combined to do this. I have one
that converts raw DV to h264/vorbis mkv. I have one for HD-PVR
recordings that can perform different actions depending on source
audio type and source audio channels. The first is a bash script, the
second perl. I think it would be pretty easy to do those conditionals.
I know with the lavc encoder, output file size can be specified with
the bitrate option. Even if this can't be done with x264 and mencoder,
it's probably possible to achieve the same result by setting the
output bitrate the same as the input.

Is any of this content HD? I have a pretty good encoding settings line
for SD but I lost my optimized HD settings.