[mythtv-users] h.264 transcoding

Raymond Wagner raymond at wagnerrp.com
Thu Apr 19 15:54:51 UTC 2012


On 4/19/2012 11:39, Thomas Boehm wrote:
> Raymond Norton wrote:
>> I have been through the wiki, looking for transcode scripts for User
>> Jobs. I am most interested in transcoding all recordings to h.264. The
>> scripts I have tried from the wiki and googling around err out for one
>> reason or another (I have libx264 enabled). Does anyone have a link to
>> an h.264 script known to work with 0.25?
> There was a discussion about this here recently (within the last
> month?). If you want to transcode ALL recordings, you will spend more in
> electricity than you would save in cost of the additional disk space.

With the typical midrange dual core CPU found on a MythTV system, and 
good x264 quality settings with a respectable bitrate, they're about 
even.  With an older chip like a P4, or even stuff like early model 
Ath64s and Core2s, direct storage wins.  With something like a modern SB 
i7, transcoding wins.  Of course the Thai flooding really threw a wrench 
into the whole works, as hard drives should be down around $0.02/GB if 
we had maintained the existing trends.  It really comes down to how much 
time it takes you to manage all that stuff, and unless you're doing this 
for compatibility with some hardware decoder, its typically not worth 
the effort.


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list