Converting Digital recordings

What's your favourite procedure for handling digital recordings from PC
digital terrestrial cards?

I can play these back fine using the TV players on the PC but if you want to
archive them
or play them back from Disc on a TV then it gets more complicated.

My normal goal is to get these through to a Divx format which I can burn on
to DVD
and play these back on my Yamada player which can handle these.

However, the path to get a clean Divx file from the Mpeg transport stream
seems to be
convoluted and / or error prone.

The simplest procedure I've found is to use DVDx which give a relatively
quick one stage
conversion. http://www.labdv.com/dvdx

However the big downside is that DVDx is really designed for DVD or program
stream
conversion. Although it works with transport stream files, any slight glitch
in the stream is
likely to crash it. I find recordings on the BBC channels are normally fine,
but the ITV
muxes rarely work and it's not funny to get a crash after 3 hours of a high
quality 2 pass
Divx conversion. I think the ITV ones are prone because the stream encoding
is less robust
(even though I get very few visible glitches) and also there can be glitches
and format
changes during the adverts.

So faced with that I'm now working my way through a whole collection of
procedures using
a collection of tools. I'm having a fair bit of success but trying to
automate more and reduce
the pain threshold.

First stage seems to be a demux with PVAStrumento which seems to fix most
(but not all)
glitch problems.

I've then tried a couple of branches from here.

First is to run the video path through DVDx with blank audio.
That gives a quick fairly painless conversion except that with 2 passes it
comes up with
a dialog in the middle to remind you there's no audio, so you have to be
around to OK it.
Then expand the audio to a wav file and then mux the avi video and the wav
using
VirtualDub. These last two ops are fairly quick but you still have to be
around to press
the buttons.

Second path is to use avisynth as a front end to mux the files and serve
them to VirtualDub
Then use filters to resize, crop and smooth as needed in VirtualDub. This
seems to work OK
and could be more amenable to automation / batch operation, but the overall
speed seems
about half the speed of DVDx for the same result.

The other variable is editing out starts, stops and adverts. I normally try
to do this in VirtualDub
as that is working in the Divx domain and is very fast. Some recordings
which crashed DVDx
even after a PVAStrumento Demux I've fixed by skipping over the offending
piece by using
MPEG2Schnitt which works OK but is much slower as it's creating the much
larger MPEG2 files.

Robert Tidey wrote:
What's your favourite procedure for handling digital recordings from
PC digital terrestrial cards?


I got so sick of the amount of messing about you have to do, and the
amount of time it takes to encode, that I just gave up and decided that
with DVD-Rs about 50p per disc, and with dual-layer DVDs (8.5 GB per
disc)) and HD-DVD and Blu Ray (both about 15-20GB per disc) formats
around the corner, and presumably 50p discs once they're mass-produced,
then I just don't see the point in all the messing around in order to
save 30% or so of an MPEG-2 recording.


--
Steve - www.digitalradiotech.co.uk - Digital Radio News & Info

DAB sounds worse than FM, Freeview, digital satellite, cable and
broadband internet radio

On Sun, 2 May 2004 19:32:41 +0100, "Robert Tidey"
wrote:

What's your favourite procedure for handling digital recordings from PC
digital terrestrial cards?

TMPGEnc to (S)VCD. Job done.

--
QrizB

"On second thought, let's not go to Z'Ha'Dum. It is a silly place."

"Robert Tidey" writes:

My normal goal is to get these through to a Divx format which I can burn
on
to DVD
and play these back on my Yamada player which can handle these.

Robert, have you tried Vidomi? Works quite well for a lot of people. Also
much praised is Nero - the latest versions include Nero Recode: (relatively)
fast conversion to mpeg4 format. Maybe your Yamada can handle the end
result?

But as already pointed out, is it really worth converting to DivX at all?
Blank DVDs are getting cheaper all the time, and if you stay with mpeg2 you
will save yourself many hours of transcoding time.

As you know, very few DVD authoring programs will succesfully handle the
Transport Streams that DTT cards produce (although I have, *occasionally*,
been able to send an unprocessed Nova-t file direct to TMPGenc DVD Author
and produce a perfect DVD), and will need to be processed eg via
PVASTrumento. Also well worth trying is ProjectX - fussy to set up but
capable of excellent results. Personally I use mpeg-vcr for
editing/transitions, TMPGEnc for frame cropping when necessary (requires a
full transcode) and TMPG DVD Author for authoring to disc. I usually find
that one of the following processes will produce a file that can be
edited/authored to DVD, and produce a disc that is free of glitches or loss
of audio/visual synch:

1. PVASTrumento - selecting the "make PS" option, then editing/authoring as
req'd.
2. ditto, but selecting the "demux" option, then remuxing with mpg-vcr (or
TMPGEnc), then proceeding as (1.).
3. ProjectX - selecting the "demux" action, then remuxing with mpeg-vcr (or
TMPGEnc), then editing/authoring.
4. ProjectX - selecting the "to TS" action, then editing/authoring.
5 Sometimes using Pvas ("make PS" option) and passing the result to TMPG for
a simple remux *WITHOUT* demuxing first works - sounds daft, I know, muxing
an already multiplexed file, but it occasionally works.

Good Luck.

Ron.

Ronald Marlowe wrote:
"Robert Tidey" writes:

My normal goal is to get these through to a Divx format which I can
burn on to DVD
and play these back on my Yamada player which can handle these.

Robert, have you tried Vidomi? Works quite well for a lot of people.
Also much praised is Nero - the latest versions include Nero Recode:
(relatively) fast conversion to mpeg4 format. Maybe your Yamada can
handle the end result?

But as already pointed out, is it really worth converting to DivX at
all? Blank DVDs are getting cheaper all the time, and if you stay
with mpeg2 you will save yourself many hours of transcoding time.

As you know, very few DVD authoring programs will succesfully handle
the Transport Streams that DTT cards produce (although I have,
*occasionally*, been able to send an unprocessed Nova-t file direct
to TMPGenc DVD Author and produce a perfect DVD), and will need to
be
processed eg via PVASTrumento. Also well worth trying is ProjectX -
fussy to set up but capable of excellent results. Personally I use
mpeg-vcr for editing/transitions, TMPGEnc for frame cropping when
necessary (requires a full transcode) and TMPG DVD Author for
authoring to disc. I usually find that one of the following
processes
will produce a file that can be edited/authored to DVD, and produce
a
disc that is free of glitches or loss of audio/visual synch:

1. PVASTrumento - selecting the "make PS" option, then
editing/authoring as req'd.
2. ditto, but selecting the "demux" option, then remuxing with
mpg-vcr (or TMPGEnc), then proceeding as (1.).
3. ProjectX - selecting the "demux" action, then remuxing with
mpeg-vcr (or TMPGEnc), then editing/authoring.
4. ProjectX - selecting the "to TS" action, then editing/authoring.
5 Sometimes using Pvas ("make PS" option) and passing the result to
TMPG for a simple remux *WITHOUT* demuxing first works - sounds
daft,
I know, muxing an already multiplexed file, but it occasionally
works.

Good Luck.

Ron.

Thanks for the input. I'll give some of those a try (Vidomi and Nero
especially)

As mentioned in another thread DrDivx seems to work with few problems
so I'll give that
one a go as well. It also has batch handling which is nice.

I'm not so worried about the DVD blanks cost using Divx.
It just helps keep the number of discs generated down to reasonable
number.
I'm using quite high bit rates for divx so there is little
degradation, but it means I can get about 4 movies on a disc.
Transcoding time is also not a problem if I can batch it overnight.
It's about half real time on my machine doing
2 pass encodes.

"Robert Tidey" wrote in message
...
What's your favourite procedure for handling digital recordings from PC
digital terrestrial cards?

Not DVB-T, but I use VDR (http://www.cadsoft.de/vdr) with a DVB-S card for
the FTA BBC channels on Astra 2 (it will also work with a DVB-T card, but
it's slightly more complicated as VDR (without additional plugins) needs a
"full-featured" DVB card (i.e. with MPEG encoder) - plugins are available
for it to work with only a DVB-T card and a DXR card for output. In fact, a
plugin is also available for using a PVR250 connected to a Sky box, but I've
not had the time yet to try it out). There is also a plugin called
"vdrconvert" that has modules for conversion to various formats, such as dvd
(s)vcd, etc. vdr2dvd will convert VDR's own recordings (TS) to DVD format,
and then I just use growisofs to burn to DVD+R[W] (actually, vdrconvert can
do the burning itself too, but I decided to do that bit manually).

Obviously there is no compression, but there again my crappy little £40 DVD
player from Safeways can't do Divx anyway... So a two-hour recording (plus a
few minutes) = 1 disk, but the media is pretty cheap now, especially in
batches of 250. Generally 1 film = 1 disk (or approx. 6 episodes of
Balamory, as you prefer...). If you want to Divx, there is a vdrconvert
module that will do vdr2divx

Iwan


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"Robert Tidey" wrote in message
...
What's your favourite procedure for handling digital recordings from PC
digital terrestrial cards?

big snip

Give VideoReDo a try (www.videoredo.com) .

I use it for my Nebula DigiTV recordings. I just load the recording into
VideoReDo, cut any adverts and/or top and tail it (very easy to do) and
then save it back. I then just burn it to DVD and play it on my Yamada
6600.

The whole process can take less than ten minutes )

Astraweb wrote:
"Robert Tidey" wrote in message
...
What's your favourite procedure for handling digital recordings
from
PC digital terrestrial cards?

big snip

Give VideoReDo a try (www.videoredo.com) .

I use it for my Nebula DigiTV recordings. I just load the recording
into VideoReDo, cut any adverts and/or top and tail it (very easy to
do) and then save it back. I then just burn it to DVD and play it
on
my Yamada 6600.

The whole process can take less than ten minutes )

Thanks for the input.
I've tried that, works quite nicely in the MPEG domain, but pretty
much just a jazzier version of MPEG2Schnitt.

I've now given DRDivx a try and that seems to be stable even with the
transport streams to give me the avi divx files I want. Editing these
is then quick and easy with VirtualDub.

The other nice thing is that you can batch up jobs in it to leave it
running over night. If I can't find anything better berfore it's 15
day trial runs out then I might end up going down that route.

What's your favourite procedure for handling digital recordings from PC
digital terrestrial cards?

probably little help, but over in the land of Mac OSX we have a box
from elgato that works for me without issue.

basically with tvtv.co.uk it works like tivo and records
all the tv i want.

then i can save this to CD or DVD as the stream is saved
raw.

its not help to you with a pc, but i just thought i'd give you
a perspective from the mac world.

it really is VERY easy.

Robert Tidey wrote:

The other nice thing is that you can batch up jobs in it to leave it
running over night. If I can't find anything better berfore it's 15
day trial runs out then I might end up going down that route.


Nero Recode is unbelievably fast compared to DivX, and Nero are going to
put the new H.264/AVC codec (the most efficient codec available) in the
next release:

http://tinyurl.com/ysrdg

I've not had much of a play with Nero Recode, but I re-compressed a 30
minute MPEG2 video file and it did it in something like half an hour
(Ahtlon 2500), whereas DivX seems to take a couple of hours using
2-pass, and that's not even on the slow or slowest settings.

IIRC though, DR DivX allows you to input MPEG2 files, so Nero Recode has
the drawback that you've got to use ProjectX or PVAstrumento, then
IfoEdit to get the file into VOB format before it recognises the video
file. So, if you're going to leave it going overnight, then the coding
time isn't an issue, and Dr DivX probably does require the least effort
on your behalf out of anything I've come across.


--
Steve - www.digitalradiotech.co.uk - Digital Radio News & Info

DAB sounds worse than FM, Freeview, digital satellite, cable and
broadband internet radio