Freeview filesizes

[Cyb]

I'm using a Nova-T in the UK and I'm guessing that as I get different filesizes per hour from various channels that the broadcast bitrate is somehow used when recording, i.e BBC1 seems to be about 2Gb an hour & E4 about 1GB an hour.

Is there a way to process the files that I want to keep to a lower bitrate but maintain mpeg2 format (for MVP) ?

[sub]

There is nothing built in for doing this. With freeview, you'll basically get whatever bitrate the broadcaster uses.

[Cyb]

Thx sub, I suspected as much, time to play with ffmpeg then I think

[djtaylor]

If it's of any interest, I played with mencoder to achieve the same this morning. This works:-

"C:\PROGRAM files\devnz\gbpvr\mencoder.exe" %1 -noskip -of mpeg -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vbitrate=%Bitrate% -o "%~dpn1 (Archive).mpg" -vf scale=720:576:1

Just set an environment variable to whatever rate you want. You might not need or want to add the scale factor, I do that because when some of our stuff is broadcast, it's sent in an odd way for example, a show last night 544 x 576 but the broadcaster broadcasts it in 16:9 which effectively stretches it to a 4:3 ratio. Bit of a pain really!

If you don't make it fit a specific size, the MVP has a desire to play back a 16:9 broadcast starting at the top of the screen such that you have a big black section of the screen at the bottom.

David.