IvanV

I have an analog TV tuner card and I recorded a TV show with Windows Media Center (Windows 7 edition). The recording went fine, image quality is great, but the files are huge and I thought that something like 1Mbps XviD would be more appropriate and practical for SD TV. Can anyone tell me a proper way to do this, preferably with free software?


This is what I have done so far (not relevant if you have a working solution, but maybe someone who has worked with these tools can tell me what I'm doing wrong):

First I turned the recording into a regular mpg file:
- first I converted the wtb file to dvr-ms;
- then I extracted plain mpg from that using DVRMSToolbox.

Next, I tried using Avidemux to compress the file, but the video in the resulting file ran faster than audio. I got MPEG-2 plugin for VirtualDub by fccHandler and tried that, but again I ended up with a file that was considerably shorter than the original due to video running faster than it should. Then I found these two pages 1 2 and armed myself with DGMPGDec and Avisynth:
- I opened the mpg file with DGIndex and saved the project, which gave me a d2v file;
- I made the following avisynth script and saved it in the same directory as the mpg and dv2 files: - I opened the script with VirtualDub and encoded the file as Xvid.

Unfortunately, video was still running too quickly and this time I was even unable to seek the resulting file.


Edit: I don't know why it says here "d ll" in the first line of the script, but for some reason I can't correct it here and the script itself doesn't contain the typo.

__________________
If anyone has Portal 2 and hasn't played the co-op and wants to do me a favour, let me know (PM me or whatever).

[hobo]eclipse

have u ever tried MeGUI? I'm no whizz with it, but i know its regularly updated and i have done a small handfull of recodes with it, usually using the x264/.mkv solution. it does do xvid aswell and muxing to avi, m2ts. and mp4 also. i dunno if it accepts the MS formats but it should handle the mpg fine

i've used it more than any thing to recode 5.1 aac to ac3 for the reciever.

Tril

I'm using Windows Media Center in Windows 7 with a TV tuner card. I'm not a pro at encoding but I've tried MeGUI this week and I got it to work.

The encoding hangs when you try to directly encode from wtv. It does not hangs when converting from dvr-ms so you have to convert to dvr-ms first. You probably know about it already but the tool to convert to dvr-ms is built-in Windows 7. Just righ-click the file and the context menu has an option to convert the file.

I know you said you wanted to encode to xvid but I'll give you some other information in case you want to encode to x264. After you install MeGUI and let it update, the x264 encoder might not be up to date. You can download a recent version from x264 revision 1376. Place the file x264.exe in the folder "C:\Program Files (x86)\megui\tools\x264".

I compress the audio with Nero AAC (for no particular reason, it was suggested in a tutorial). To do that, you need to download the codec, copy the three files to "C:\Program Files (x86)\megui\tools\neroaac" and you add that folder in the settings of MeGUI. You can use the included audio plugins instead if you want.

Using MeGUI is pretty easy. Click on file, open, change the file filter to all files, select you dvr-ms file. It will open the AviSynth Script Creator. If you want to resize, crop or deinterlace the video, you can select options. Once you are done, click save.

If you want to manually remove parts of the show like the advertisement, you can use a tool included in MeGUI. Click Tools, AVS Cutter. Select the no transition style. Enter the frame numbers of the segments you want to keep. Once they are all added, click add cuts to script and save cuts file, then click close. On the audio settings, load the cuts file.

The audio input needs to be filed out. Select the dvr-ms file. Choose the encoder settings for the video and the audio. Click on AutoEncode. Click no target size and click queue. On MeGUI, click the queue tab, click start and wait.

I can't really recommend video and audio settings as I'm not expert on encoding.

I'm not totally sure but I think that the dvr-ms files contain interlaced video and it is deinterlaced on playback by WMC. If this is true, that means that you would need to deinterlace before encoding if you want to watch the recorded shows to look good when wathcing them on something other than WMC.

Analog TV here is NTSC with a aspect ratio of 4:3. My TV tuner card records files of 720x480 with a SAR of 1.5. If I understand that stuff, it means that it records 720x480 pixels but it squeezed the video on playback so that it displays with the correct aspect ratio. I have two choices when I encode.

1 - I keep the 720x480 resolution and I add two lines in my script to make the video resize on playback to a 4:3 aspect ratio. To do that, add the following in the avs script :
global MeGUI_darx = 4
global MeGUI_dary = 3

2 - Resize to 640x480. The SAR and the DAR will automatically change to a 4:3 aspect ratio.

I would say that the second choice is better. Both of them should look the same on screen but the second choice will make the file size smaller since there are less pixels stored.

It would be nice if someone knew of a way of totally automating the conversion to dvr-ms and the encoding. I would set my computer to automatically encode all my shows and delete the original files in the middle of the night.

__________________

IvanV

Thank you both.

Unfortunately, despite Tril's very straight-forward walkthrough, no luck. This is what I did:

- installed and updated MeGUI;
- opened a dvr-ms file;
- just clicked save on the next screen (screenshot);
- set up x264 compression as shown and clicked AutoEncode (screenshot);
- chose No Target Size and clicked Queue (screenshot);
- when given the prompt, I chose to convert video to YV12 (I tried not converting it, but in that case video encoding fails);
- unfortunately, when I encode I get a file with only audio (video is not present at all judging by the file size) or, when I substitute x264.exe for the one Tril linked to, I get an error at the end of the second pass (screenshot); encoding is way too fast both times and the video preview that shows up at an earlier stage when the video is first opened is gray, so it seems that the original video is not being decoded properly.

__________________
If anyone has Portal 2 and hasn't played the co-op and wants to do me a favour, let me know (PM me or whatever).

[hobo]eclipse

i dont believe ac3 mixes too well with .mp4, i would try the aac or move to mp3 in a .mkv. also are you understanding how video and audio are recoded to two differ files? u must hit enque for each,( then showing 2 jobs in the ques tab). after they are done u must then muxe them together using the muxe option in the tools drop down, do this by queing a muxe job and stating it from the queue tab.

i would maybe try encoding to rawavc video and aac audio then muxing the 2 into mp4

temeteus82

Handbrake ?!

HandBrake

__________________

IvanV

Here's what my queue looks like before I press start, I'd say that all the necessary jobs are there:

The problem is that an error occurs at the end of job3 and that job2 and job3 go at over 100fps (which my CPU isn't capable of). Also, if I use x264.exe supplied with MeGUI, I'll actually end up with "short muxed.mp4", but it's going to be sound only (and ~1MB in size, which means that there's no video). I also tried encoding only video to short.mkv, but again I get an error during the second pass and switching to XviD and single pass as the simplest process of all doesn't help either.

EDIT: I'll try Handbrake.

__________________
If anyone has Portal 2 and hasn't played the co-op and wants to do me a favour, let me know (PM me or whatever).

IvanV

YES!!! Temeteus, you're the man!

__________________
If anyone has Portal 2 and hasn't played the co-op and wants to do me a favour, let me know (PM me or whatever).

temeteus82

It has worked for me ... going from dvb-t mpeg2 to avi

__________________

[hobo]eclipse

good to here ya got it, i'll remember to try handbrake if i ever need in the future