[mythtv-users] Plextor M402U. Supported or not?

[Steven Adeff]

On 3/16/06, Jim Minihane <min02jsm at minihane.tzo.com> wrote:
> ----Original Message-----
> From: "Dale E. Martin" <dale at the-martins.org>
> To: Discussion about mythtv <mythtv-users at mythtv.org>
> Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 23:03:00 -0500
> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Plextor M402U. Supported or not?
>
> > > Who has the Plextor M402U working and on what distro. What did it
> > take?
> >
> > I've got two running on Debian sarge + 2.6.x kernel images (grabbed
> > from
> > unstable) and hand-compiled modules and mythtv.  They're working really
> > well for me.
> >
> > Two issues that I've had:
> > - you can only select mpeg-4, even in 0.19.  I'm not super picky about
> > video quality so it's no big deal, but...
> > - transcode to mpeg-2 does not seem to work.  I'd like to hear someone
> > else
> > chime in on this and see if it's me doing something stupid or if it's
> > really not supported.
> >
> > Just tonight I backported more recent codecs back to Debian stable and
> > mplayer will player the .nuv files now, so it seems like support for
> > these
> > units is getting better all of the time.
> >
> > Take care,
> >   Dale
>
> What do you mean "super picky"? Is MPEG2 visibly better than MPEG4?

yes and no... mpeg4 (h263) doesn't handle blacks or solid colors as
well as mpeg2. mpeg4 (h263) does give better compression though, so
you get a lower bitrate for a given level of quality. As well h263
doesn't do higher bitrates as well as mpeg2 from what I understand.
h264 changes this though. h264 is a subset of mpeg4 video and fixes
the black level problems and the solid color problems. It also has
much better compression than mpeg2, it does however require much more
CPU power to get this compression level.

--
Steve