[mythtv-users] NUV TO WINDOWS PC

[Scott Alfter]

Martin Hartman III wrote:
> From day one I wanted to be able to download shows from my MythTV box, 
> convert them, and burn to DVD.  I am a life long Windows user and did
> not think this was possible to go from .nuv to something Windows could
> understand.  I read how you had to use nuvexport or nuv2avi.  Well, I am
> here to tell you that this is not at all necessary.  For all you Windows
> users out there, all you have to do is download the .nuv file through a
> Samba mount on your MythTV box and rename the extension to .mpg and it
> will work perfectly.

As others have no doubt already pointed out, that only works if your MythTV
recordings are MPEG-2 (which means you're most likely doing hardware encoding).
 That said, you can transcode your video (whether captured with hardware or
software encoding) with mplayer into a smaller AVI that your Windows machines
can play.  You can even get watchable video at a low-enough bitrate that it's
feasible to download the transcoded video from your server at home to a remote
location (like when you're out of town).

The following command will transcode foo.nuv to a 768-kbps file with MPEG-4
video and MP3 audio (line breaks are for clarity):

mencoder -o foo.avi -ovc lavc \
                    -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:bitrate=704 \
                    -vop scale=320:240 \
                    -srate 32000 \
                    -oac mp3lame \
                    -lameopts cbr:br=64:mode=3 \
                    foo.nuv

The video is scaled to 320x240 and encoded at 704 kbps.  The audio is
subsampled to 32 kHz and encoded in mono at 64 kbps CBR.

If your upstream bandwidth is further constrained, you can get watchable
quality at 256 kbps:

mencoder -o foo.avi -ovc lavc \
                    -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:bitrate=224 \
                    -vop scale=240:180 \
                    -srate 22050 \
                    -oac mp3lame \
                    -lameopts cbr:br=32:mode=3 \
                    foo.nuv

The video is scaled to 240x180 and encoded at 224 kbps.  The audio is
subsampled to 22.05 kHz and encoded in mono at 32 kbps CBR.

In both cases, the resulting files play in Windows Media Player with the codecs
that come with any system.  You don't need to install any external codecs or
codec packs to view the transcoded video.  With a cable-modem connection at
home and broadband of some sort in the hotel (or wherever), I can watch MythTV
recordings anywhere.  You can even cut the commercials out of the downloaded
file in just a few minutes with VirtualDub (you'll need to install ffdshow and
configure it to make its MPEG-4 decoder available to VfW so you can see what
you're cutting), so you can just kick back and let the show run.

  _/_
 / v \ Scott Alfter
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