[mythtv-users] Transcoding SD MPEG2 to H.264---recommendations?

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

    > Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2010 13:19:03 +0000
    > From: "D. R. Newman" <d.r.newman at e-consultation.org>

    > On 29/11/10 08:52, f-myth-users at media.mit.edu wrote:

    > > However---the result was unusable.  The activity log was crammed full
    > > of "audio 192 time went backwards 0 ms, dropped 1 frames" and "video
    > > time didn't advance - dropped 1 frames" lines, and about halfway
    > > through the transcode, it suddenly went from claiming it had 20
    > > minutes to go, to done.  (It also said "sync: got 26887 frames, 60691
    > > expected", which might explain a thing or two.)  And the result, as you
    > > might expect, was a jumpy mess.
    > > 
    > > I have no idea why this didn't work.

    > One possibility is that the source file contains lots of errors. I

I considered that, but c'mon.  It was just a normal PVR-250 recording
from an STB.  It plays just fine.  It seems unlikely that every other
frame (on average) has an error in it.

    > normally remultiplex everything before conversion. I use ProjectX to
    > demultiplex a recording into separate sound and video files, then mplex
    > to put them back together, synchronising the sound and video at the same
    > time. ProjectX is pretty good at detecting and tidying up errors in
    > recordings. I find that this even makes a difference on DVB-T digital
    > recordings.

    > I actually run ProjectX and mplex from a script (attached). But to do
    > that, you need to compile ProjectX to run without a GUI, otherwise it
    > tries to pop up an Xwindow owned by mythtv. So you may want to start by
    > manually using ProjectX and mplex, then try Handbrake/Avidemux or
    > whatever on the resulting file.

Yeah, if I have to, I'll preprocess, but this seemed surprisingly
broken, and I'm always wary of breaking up & rejoining AV precisely
because I don't want sync errors creeping in.  I may give this a try
with a LiveCD of a different Ubuntu release or something, in case it's
this particular version of Handbrake that's broken.

Or, if anyone has a favorite non-Handbrake set of args for ffmpeg or
whatever, I'll try those, too.  Handbrake was just the first thing I
tried, since people often recommend it and it was easy to give it a
shot, but I have no particular reason to prefer it to any other
scriptable solution that actually works.