[mythtv-users] Semi-OT anyone recording New York OTA, and NBC 4.1

[Peter Bennett]

On 05/29/2018 06:44 PM, Tom Dexter wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone here who records New York OTA has noticed
> the same things I've noticed with NBC 4.1 since the recent move to a
> new frequency, and apparently from the Empire State building antenna
> to 1 WTC:
>
> Until this change I've never seen OTA MPEG-TS recordings less than
> about 3 GB / hour for 720p, and for 1081i generally well over 6 GB /
> hour. The latter was always the case with the 4.1 1080i recordings,
> but since that move my recordings of 4.1 are literally 1/2 the size
> they were. Here are records of two 1/2 hour episodes of the same show,
> the first before the move and the second after:
>
> 3.3G    1041_20180330013000.ts
> 1.6G    1703_20180526000000.ts
>
> That's awful. According to mplayer -identify they're both supposedly
> using a video bitrate of 24000000, but I think that's wildly
> inaccurate with MPEG-TS streams.
>
> Just wondered if anyone else noticed that. Totally sucks. I credit the
> insanity of allowing Comcast to buy one of the only free OTA stations.
> Don't even get me started.
>
> The reception was also almost unusable for me after the move. I'm in
> central NJ. Testing with my hdhomerun_config utility, the signal
> strength and signal to noise wasn't too bad, but the seq (signal error
> quality) was constantly going from 100 to 0. I turned my antenna
> slightly more to the north and lately at least this has been
> acceptable. But yea...that recording size is is not a good sign for
> sure.
>
> Tom
> _______________________________________________
>
Perhaps they moved from mpeg2 to h264, in which case a big reduction in 
size is possible without any loss of quality. Try ffprobe or mediainfo 
on one of the recording to check.