MythTV and Transcoding

[ubuntite]

I am running a MythTV backend on a Ubuntu 8.10 system with a Hauppauge PVR-500 dual tuner and the latest T3CH build on an xbox. I want to know what is the best way to record and automatically transcode my programs so that they take up less space than the originally recorded mpeg2 file and so that they play back with with the best reliability (no stuttering!) on xbmc on the xbox using myth://. I have had very poor results using the built-in transcoder and .nuv files. I assume I would have better results transcoding to a xvid or something similar.

In the mythtv setup, does it matter which "stream type" I choose? i.e. MPEG-2 PS, MPEG-2 TS, DVD, DVD-Special 1, DVD-Special 2, etc.?

What is the best way to automatically transcode a recording to an "XBOX-XBMC-friendly" format and keep the resulting recording in the recordings database?

This has been driving me crazy for some time. I would love a solution!

[pcdude]

Have you tried posting in the MythTV forums? Like you, I would love to get this to work as I have been experiencing problems with Myth sources. I have a PVR 150 card that encodes everything to .mpg (MPEG-2) format. Since the commercial skip is currently not implemented in xbmx, transcoding and running commercial skip in myth would be a nice thing to get working.

[BenH]

Hi

I use the following settings in a transcoding profile in mythtv and the files (originating from 1080i MPEG2 tv in Australia) playback fine on my xbox and still look pretty good:

Resize video while transcoding:
width=720
Height=576
Codec=MPEG-4
Bitrate=3000
Max Quality=2
Min Quality=15
Max Quality diff between frames=3
Scale bitrate for frame size=checked
Enable high-quality encoding=checked
Enable 4MV encoding=checked
Enable interlaced DCT encoding=checked
Enable interlaced motion estimation=checked
Number of threads=1
Codec=MP3
Sampling rate=48000
MP3 quality=7
Volumr=90

Regards
Ben