Star Trek: TNG transcodes

[txporter]

I guess this is the first time that I have really tried to deal with content that is a heavy mix of VIDEO and FILM content. I have read through the VFR section on avisynth.org and also the docs on TIVTC. It looks like I can fairly easily just use the NTSC Hybrid blend decimation approach. Although I would like to avoid blending if I can.

I don't think I really understand the NTSC Hybrid using vfr for mkv section. Does that actually create the video, or just the timestamp file? Or do I need to have the timestamp file to feed it? Can the video be muxed into mp4 container rather than mkv?

Aside from those questions above, what do others do that want to transcode TNG DVDs? Looking for ideas.

[nic2k4]

What are you trans-coding to? If you're doing XVID, use AutoGK. It takes care of all that automatically and does a pretty good job. If you want the best quality possible, set the quality to 80%.

[txporter]

Sorry, forgot to include that. I am encoding with x264 to mp4 container. I convert my DVDs to mp4 and then load them on my Tivo for playback. It doesn't play-well with XVID. I need to end up with h.264 video in mp4 container.

[jman98]

May I ask what your reasons are for wanting to do this in the first place?

1) You cannot make the output better than the source DVD so if that is your reason you're going to waste an awful lot of time on this.
2) This is not the year 1998. 2 TB disk drives are commonly available. Heck you can even get a 3 TB drive from Western Digitial if you've got the right hardware to support it. For best quality you should just rip and leave alone.

No offense but this just seems like an awful lot of work for no gain. We have people here who think that everything they encode with H.264 magically becomes better than their source video and I just want to rule that out for you. But then again I could be wrong and you could have some reason that actually is fairly good for doing it. And it's your life and your time, not mine, even if you don't have any good reason at all and still want to do it.

If you are curious, TNG is hybrid because the special effects were done on video tape. One of our forum regulars posted at length on this in a thread more than a year ago about the difficulties in turning all the Star Trek TV series (except the original series and Enterprise) into BluRay.

[jman98]

While I was writing my response I see that you did post your reason. Personally I wouldn't go through all that trouble. Tivo isn't really designed as a media player. There are much easier and more elegant solutions such as just buying a media player that would save you boatloads of time in not having to convert anything. Western Digital even makes one now that has a 1 TB drive with it. I'm not saying this to insult but some people place no value at all on their spare time and will gladly spend infinite amounts of time on projects like this just to save money so if you are such a person I'm sure that others can post and help you out.

[txporter]

Thanks for your input. It is a solution that works well for my family and personally, I don't think that it takes up too much of my time. I enjoy learning to manipulate the video. For me, it is a sort of hobby and my wife enjoys watching everything from a central source (I have one Tivo feeding all of our TVs around the house through a component distribution/amplifier).

edit: Oh, and yes I understand why the video is hybrid. If you can find the discussion that you spoke of, I would enjoy looking through it.

[freebird73717]

Actually the tivo works quite well as a media player. I use streambaby to stream video via cat5 cable from my PC to my TiVo. Works damn well. I rarely come across any videos that don't work since streambaby uses ffmpeg to do on the fly transcode/stream.

Now I don't do much in the way of pushing mp4 from my pc directly to the tivo like txporter is doing. While what he is doing will surely provide better quality (because it's just transfering video from the pc to the tivo without transcoding) for me streaming with on the fly transcoding is good enough.

[yoda313]

streaming with on the fly transcoding is good enough.

Just a note of caution I think you need at least a dual core pc to do this reasonably well. Plus I am not sure but I think you need a clean pipeline while streaming. I do not know but I imagine doing internet downloads while streaming may impact the quality - but I don't know for sure.

Also your pc probably shouldn't be running too many programs while transcoding either to keep up with it.

If you have a slower computer and/or don't have a fast enough computer available to use as a streamer you may want to go the encoding route. It would take time but that way once you have your destination compatible file you don't have to take up computer time and can play it natively on your destination device.

[freebird73717]

I primarily use my TiVo to stream dvd's that are encoded to mp4 with handbrake. I could use the push method mentioned by txporter but that would require sending the file to the tivo , whatching it, then deleting it.

I am able to download while streaming just fine. However I don't do any other encoding while streaming.

Still, Yes a dedicated media player is always going to be the best solution. However for people that already have TiVo's, their tivo units can serve quite well as media centers. There's actually quite alot of people that use their tivo's that way. Just do a google search for pytivo or streambaby and you will see ton's of info about them and how they can use your pc to turn your TiVo into a very good media device.

however this is really going off topic...
My apologies to txporter for taking his thread off track.