[mythtv-users] Question on recording sizes and DVD burning

Peter Bennett (cats22) cats22 at comcast.net
Tue Jan 21 23:24:13 UTC 2014


On 01/21/2014 11:32 AM, John Pilkington wrote:
> Ok, Adding to my last post (sorry) I guess the reason it takes soooooo
> long for me is that Iam rescaling a 1920x<whatever> recording with a bit
> rate of 9000 to a 720 resolution and a bit rate of 4771.
>
> I will just let it run and see how long this thing goes. Probably look
> around to see if this thing is broadcast in 720 instead. Then I dont
> have to convert the video and it will probably take alot less time.
>
>
I have been doing a lot of archiving of shows. With the right scripts it
works really well. I archive 1080p recordings to 750 MB to 1 GB per
hour, so you can fit some 6 hours of HD on a regular DVD. The quality is
almost 100%, there is an occasional artifact. This is done on a low-end
machine (Pentium Dual core), taking around 2 hours to encode each hour
of video. With a higher end machine faster times are achieved, I have a
four year old  I7 that does around 1 hour of video in one hour.

I am using Handbrake to encode with x264. The settings are important,
with the wrong settings you can take 12 hours to encode 1 hour of video.
I have scripts that look at the recording group and if it is set to x264
the recordings are automatically encoded once a day.

I am not using the myth to transcode jobs, I run mythlinks to create
links to the files, then run handbrake scripts against them.

By using constant quality instead of constant bit rate encoding, you can
do it in one pass, but the size of files varies with the type of
material, hence the variation in file sizes. However the quality will be
constant.

I am also copying the encoded files back to mythtv and deleting the
original files, saving a bunch of space in my recording groups.

My scripts are all here - http://code.google.com/p/mythtv-scripts/

Look at
http://code.google.com/p/mythtv-scripts/source/browse/trunk/install/opt/mythtv/bin/encode_video.sh
http://code.google.com/p/mythtv-scripts/source/browse/trunk/install/opt/mythtv/bin/handbrake_encode.sh

Peter


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