HD mpgs - how to play on MVP

[HtV]

@ wtg: I'm sure you can see the recordings both in videolibrary.
When you would use the manual transcoding you could start watching it right away. You'll find out soon enough if your system is powerful enough.

[wtg]

I added the following line to config.xml custom-ffmpeg-conversions (something like that). I "borrowed' it from GUI4FFmpeg. Now I can transcode any movie to mpeg in video library. Just add your recordings-dir to the video library dirs in config.

Code:

<Conversion name="MPG-DVD" cmd="-y -i {SOURCE_FILE} -target pal-dvd -b 4500k -aspect 16:9 -s 720x576 -acodec mp2 -ab 224 -ac 2 -mbd 2 -qmin 2 -async 1 {DEST_FILE}" targetExtension=".mpg" />

You might have to adjust it for ntsc. This is the link to the ffmpeg docs: http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/documentation.html

Unfortunately this didn't quite work for me. Because the source is MPG and so is the destination, it tries to use the same filename for both and that doesn't fly, as you might imagine. I can hard code a temp file name as the output file... I might just have to go with that.

I've tried recording to .ts format and seeing that'll transcode, but I don't know since the Transcode menu won't open with a .ts file highlighted.

I'll fiddle some more. Thanks for the suggestion.

[HtV]

You could change the targetextension to mpeg, gbpvr will still recognize it. I just tried, it should work.

Edit: You could also change the targetextension to e.g. SD.mpg. Then the new file name will be: orignameSD.mpg.

[wtg]

Ah, great tip... that worked. That's a good work-around while I wait for an on-the-fly solution. Thanks again!

[HtV]

I'm curious: can your system do the task realtime? What system specs do you have?

[wtg]

Yeah it can, at least for the little that I've tested it. I didn't use the command line you gave me however, though I may try that one later. I basically used the same one GB-PVR uses for the real-time AVI to MPG conversion. It converts to SVCD resolution which is smaller than the DVD resolution your command-line offers. However it certainly looks fine even on a 32-inch TV, and being able to do it real-time is obviously a huge advantage.

I'm guessing I'd have trouble if I tried to do it on a recording in progress, since in that situation I'd be running comskip in parallel. I've noticed comskip takes quite a bit more CPU and memory on a HD stream, and the disk would have a hard time keeping up with the recording, comskips and FFMpeg's reads and FFMpeg's writes too. I'll probably play some more with it later this week just to find out.

I also plan on trying the command line you provided (didn't have much free-time yesterday), but my guess is my machine won't be able to keep up at the higher bit rates.

I have an AMD 2500, 768mg ram, 600 GB and 3 MVPs.

[zehd]

I'm coming to this thread late in the game, but the original idea was: would ZProcess transcode on the fly an HD MPG to a SD MPG just like it does for AVIs.

the answer is yes... If you change a setting in the Config.xml...

<MVPTranscodeAllVideo>true</MVPTranscodeAllVideo> will invoke the transcoding mechansim on all video, even MPGs. ZProcess should be able to read the HD MPG dimensions and then adjust the aspect ratios so that it plays letterbox on your 4x3 TV...

I'd love to find out how it's working...