[mythtv-users] Best settings for transcoding HD content to save space?

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Tue May 13 19:08:54 UTC 2014


On 05/13/2014 02:52 PM, Steve Boyer wrote:
> Oh, no arguments here that there's a large loss in quality when doing
> any lossy transcoding, not to mention at those bitrates! I can tell
> the loss in quality - my wife cannot however. Just saying that if you
> can tolerate a higher loss in quality, the file sizes are even better.
>

But it's easy to find 3TB HDDs for $99.99 (or approximately $0.033/GB).  
At that cost, the 8GB recording costs $0.267 to store.  Cutting to 
1GB--which costs all the time it takes you to a) edit the recording to 
make sure commercials are properly marked (where cutting out 1/3 of the 
recording, the commercials, is the only way to get from 8GB to 1GB 
without terrible, terrible quality loss), b) set up the transcode, c) 
verify the transcode (possibly skipping through the recording to verify 
audio exists throughout and is properly synch'ed--which may well ruin 
any surprises in the recording), and remove the original--saves you 
$0.233.  If you calculate the dollars per hour of your time you're 
spending, you'd make people really appreciate even minimum wage.

Or, put another way, a 3TB HDD for $99.99 can store 375 8GB recordings.  
So you can easily record far more TV than you (and your family) will be 
able to watch with just one (or a few) inexpensive hard drives.  And, 
since you almost definitely live in a part of the world where fair use 
doesn't allow "librarying" or "archiving" recordings, you'll be watching 
and deleting recordings, which frees up all 8GB of the 8GB used by the 
recording, to make room for future recordings.

So, unless you need to transcode it because you want to play it back on 
limited device, why waste the time/effort (and lose the quality and 
possibly spoil the stories and ...)?

Mike


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