.m2ts to .mp4; H.264, 1440:1080i; Tivo and Streambaby

[OmegaTCB]

Hoping that one of the experts can point me in the right direction. I have been searching this and other forums, but still haven't been able to come up with the solution. Might have learned a little about codecs and containers along the way, but I am definitely a newbie.

My situation and end goals would seem pretty simple:

I have a bunch of home videos shot on m Sony HDR-SR7 Camcorder that I have transfered to my computer. I also have a couple of Tivo Premeirs in the house and would like to transfer and/or stream those videos to my Tivos. The Sony packages the files in a file with a .m2ts extension. tsMuxer 1.10.6 reports the following about the files inside the container:

H.264, Profile: Main@4.0 Resolution 1440:1080i Frame Rate: 29.97
AC3, Bitrate 448 kbps, Sample Rate 48 Khz Channels 6

While I have used Pinacle Studio (v 12 first, now v15) on ocassion to manipulate the files such that I could use Tivo's standard app for viewing playing the videos, it is a bit tedious and it is never clear to me if I am doing some re-encoding that would result in a loss of quality. I would like to quickly and without loss of quality, remux(?) (new word to me) the files to be able to see them through my Tivos. While I might go back later and use Pinacle to combine files and pretty things up (hopefully also without any loss of quality), right now I'd settle for getting my unedited files from my camcorder accessible.

Have recently discovered Streambaby (streaming application for Tivo), and I definitely prefer the streaming approach over the pull approach in the standard Tivo App. Have also been playing around with tsMuxeR and Yamb/Mp4box based on a little information that I found on other sites. (Mostly here: http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=444434). Using TsMuxer/Yamb without changing any defaults, the resulting file has the video playing at half-speed (I think do to some mishandling of the interlacing?). Doubling the frame rate in Yamb for the video file results in very jerky video in the final file.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

[evilronin]

Can't say I have a solution (so not sure why I'm replying ). I'm having some issues muxing and converting myself. But from what I've learned so far (a newbie also), is that muxing, for being cool as it is, also seems to be fickle about spec. My opinion considering the spec you listed coupled with my experience so far, I would say that your problem might stem from FPS more so than interlacing. I'm not too familar with TiVO streaming. And I understand you are trying to avoid long conversions and recoding. But I'm not sure if that is possible at this point. I've converted my H.264 video to 720p, level 4.1 MP4, two hour run time, using Imtoo HD converter which let's you select "same as original" quality if one wants. However, this process took my dual core CUDA three hour at single pass. This is obviously a lot more time consuming then the 5 mins max TSMuxer. But again, I think your issue is more FPS. Have you tried changing the fps during muxing to 24 or 23.976 (I think tsmuxer only lets you pick 24 but in the muxing process converts it to 23.976 - I have no idea why this is)? Tsmuxer allows you to change fps and level on the video try 24 fps at level 4.1, with the hopes that there are no error while muxing. Good luck.

[davexnet]

I don't own the equipment, but surely 29.97 is supported - that's the NTSC standard.
To covert it to 24 fps, you'll have to drop flames or blend, and it will look ugly.