[mythtv-users] What NOT to do to your Myth box...

Scott Alfter mythtv at salfter.dyndns.org
Fri Jan 14 12:02:44 EST 2005


On Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 04:44:51AM -0600, John Williams wrote:
> >I've gotten fairly good with a handful of Windows
> > programs that make DVDs out of stuff ripped from my TiVo or my MythTV.
> 
> What programs are you using for your windows archiving?

I usually start by splitting the audio out of the MPEG program stream with
DVD2AVI and decode it to WAV with LAME.  I then create an Avisynth script
(using one of the MPEG-2 decoder plugins and the Decomb plugin) to mux the
audio and video back together in something that VirtualDub can handle.  I
use VirtualDub to find ad breaks and add those to the script, along with
some frame resizing (from 480x480 to 720x480) and inverse telecine (if it's
needed).  Edited audio is saved by VirtualDub to another WAV file, which is
resampled to 48 kHz (if it's not there already) and normalized with sox and
encoed to AC3 with BeSweet.  The edited video is reencoded (usually at a
lower bitrate) with TMPGEnc.  The edited video and audio are then brought
into DVDlab for authoring.  The set of VOBs generated by DVDlab is converted
to an image file with DVD Shrink, which is then burned with DVD Decrypter.

With the exception of TMPGEnc and DVDlab, all of these programs are free
(mostly as in beer, though Avisynth, VirtualDub, LAME, and sox are free as
in speech if it matters).  You should be able to track down all of the free
stuff at Doom9 (http://www.doom9.net/).

You might be able to speed up the progress significantly (and save some
money) by (1) recording the video at 720x480 or 352x480 instead of 480x480,
(2) using nuvexport to chop ads out, and (3) using DVD Shrink to transcode
the video instead of using TMPGEnc to reencode it, but I've not tried this
yet.  One significant difference I'd see in quality with this method is that
you couldn't apply inverse 3:2 pulldown to those shows that need it.

All this works fairly well for SD video grabbed from either TiVo or MythTV. 
You end up with standard DVD-Video content that plays in anybody's DVD
player.  For HD video, you'd basically need to roll your own format at this
point if you want to keep it HD.  If you want to convert HD to SD so you can
burn it to DVD, you'll first need to convert the received transport stream
to a program stream.  replex will do that:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/dvb-replex/

Once you have a program stream, you should be able to process it with the
same tools listed above (though you'll need to add the AC3 decoder filter
for Avisynth, since most (all?) HD broadcasts use AC3 audio).

  _/_
 / v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
(IIGS( http://alfter.us/            Top-posting!
 \_^_/ rm -rf /bin/laden            >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?

 
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