ts to mkv for dummies...

[CharlieSummers]

Ok, I'm getting frustrated, and hope someone here can point me in the right direction. All I want to do is take transport stream files recorded off-air with the Hauppauge 1250 card and transcode to x264 MKVs, with similar bandwidth requirements to the scene. So for an hour show (I mean an hour, not 42-minutes) at 1080i weighing in around 7.4G, I want a 720p MKV of about 1.5G. I have a low-end quad-core running Win7, and am not particularly concerned about how long it takes.

Handbrake was extraordinary for a little while using a modified version of the High Profile preset (even keeping the embedded captions, woo-hoo!), but lately three or four out of five recordings cause Handbrake to crash on the second pass somewhere after spending hours and hours on the first pass (that annoying "HandBrakeCLI.exe has stopped working" error)...I can't find any major issues playing the TS files in VLC, so I don't know why Handbrake would suddenly start to fail me, but it's been a pretty consistent recent problem.

So I tried SUPER, and I really love it to convert video to my daughter's NDS or my cheap V-Touch player, but I cannot seem to coerce the thing to set bandwidth by size. I tried StaxRip and quickly learned to hate it...all that thing wants to do is make DVD files. Every time I set an input file, it takes off trying to convert to 480i, which I obviously do not want.

I've read through posts on this forum until my eyes bleed, and while I am awed by the amount of knowledge here, I honestly don't want to have to learn everything there is to know about transcoding just to make a simple MKV container with AAC audio and x264 video consistently day after day. Heck, the scene kids can have an MKV available within an hour of a TV show airing, so somewhere there has to be a set of scripts or GUI that simply convert TS to MKV without all of the pain. Can anyone point me to something that will let even an old guy like me quickly and painlessly convert HD TV shows to MKV files for long-term storage and viewing on the WD media player?

[Baldrick]

Maybe MEGUI. ANd use the built one click wizard together with a high quality profile made by one of the doom9 gurus. .

[CharlieSummers]

Maybe MEGUI.

Hum...tried the One-Click (MeGUI required running as administrator, don't know why), everything seemed to default correctly (to MKV, filesize 1.5G, advanced output resolution 1280, auto deinterlacing) so I clicked Go and...nothing. Switch to jobs, select Start and...after the creation of the .d2v file, it's doing something but there's no indication what other than the Process Manager showing it's using ~20% of my processing power and the job status in the queue is "processing." Ahhh...nevermind, it eventually creates additional jobs and launches 'em. Currently transcoding at ~7fps. Hum, now that seems about right...

ANd use the built one click wizard together with a high quality profile made by one of the doom9 gurus. .

He, he...one step at a time. Like I said, I'm an old guy. I did import a bunch from doom9, but I haven't yet touched anything but the onboard scratchpad profile. If this doesn't blow up in my face, I'll try that 2-pass Fast.

Still, I wonder why Handbrake suddenly decided it couldn't process my transport stream files any more...

[CharlieSummers]

So far, so good...now I have to figure out how to get the closed captions out of the TS file (CCExtractor fails miserably, am slowly going through forum posts to find something else) and into the MKV, and it'll be done. Much thanks for the pointer to MeGUI!