Automatic Conversion/Compression of HD transport streams

[karhill]

Ok, before I re-invent the wheel, I'd like to know what people are doing to compress/convert their HD transport streams. Snowsqueeze is not supported for HD transport streams, so I'm going to have to cobble something together and I'm wondering what people are doing. (In my opinion, this has to be a high priority in some future revision of BTV. It shows that the HD capabilities, while nice, are currently at an early stage.)

The recorded (OTA) transport streams have all sub-channels for a given station, which often means they contain a lot of unwanted information. Just stripping out the unwanted sub-channels with something like hdtvtompeg2 can cut storage in half. But then you tend to lose the program infomation that BTV records into the stream. And you definately lose the program information if you use hdtvtompeg2 to strip commercials. So's it's not an ideal solution to just getting rid of the subchannel information.

There's the FusionConverter software that comes with the DVIco cards. It will both strip out unwanted subchannels and convert to various formats (including MPEG2 at various bit rates). But BTV will not play the end result. (Windows Media Player and PowerDVD will play the end result.)

And, then everything has to be automatted, because I'm not going to sit around feeding file names to FusionConverter (or whatever) every night.

What good solutions people have come up with?

Before you say things like, but why would you compress your HD content, let me say that my digital tuner just brings in a much nicer signal, even if the content is sometimes only SD tv...no ghosting, no snow, etc. So in many cases I'm just trying to store SD tv resolution content in something other than a very very big .tp stream. If you start with a good picture, you can compress to varying degrees and still get a good picture (e.g. there's lots of reasons to take MPEG2 and convert to MPEG4 or some variant there-of).

[edit to correct spelling]

[cmumford]

Excellent posting - I totally agree. I have a HDTV card, but only have a standard television connected via an S-Video card. Not only do I want to transcode, but I would even like to reduce the resolution of the recording for some shows.

[patrickbaldwin]

Yes very excellent posting, I was just about to write something like that when I came across your posting. Does the lack of replies mean that no one has anything working here. It seems a plugin is in order here or perhaps a new feature in 4.x

[ccarlin]

I thought this was already done with the autoxvid project?

[addon] AutoXvid (November 12 Update)

[cmumford]

Originally Posted by ccarlin

I thought this was already done with the autoxvid project?

[addon] AutoXvid (November 12 Update)

I didn't read every posting in that thread, but if I understand it correctly it doesn't work for digital OTA broadcasts.

[ccarlin]

I thought the 3.2 release supported TP streams generated from OTA digital broadcasts?

From the 1st posting:

Added in 3.2.0.0 HD .tp and .mpg to Xvid
Supports HD .tp encoding to Xvid Use's MPG2Repair for HD .tp recordings

[karhill]

Originally Posted by ccarlin

I thought this was already done with the autoxvid project?

[addon] AutoXvid (November 12 Update)

Yes, that's what I'm talking about. That's why I asked the question, to avoid reinventing the wheel.

That's a long thread, and I'll have to take a little time reviewing it, but the autoxvid project appears to support stripping out the proper subchannel of a multi-subchannel .tp file. I'm not sure if it supports smartchapter/commercial marking/stripping, since it appears to rely on BTV smartchapter generated information to do that, and BTV 4.0 doesn't support smartchapter on HD streams. But I think they are adding that for 4.1, and I can wait on that.

So, then we will have subchannel selection, commercial stripping, and transcoding to a more efficient codec.

Thanks for the good pointer.