Experience with HD MPEGs

[jkrell]

I have been collecting MPEGs of HD material from my HR10-250s and would like to (a) edit the front and back so just the movie is included and (b) convert them to a more manageable format -- perhaps .h264 or HD-Divx -- for playback on my Sony PSP and/or through XBMC on my home entertainment center. Only as a last resort would I consider burning to DVD and that would be only if I could do so without dropping all the way down to 480p.

Questions:

1. What MPEG editors have people liked working with on the HD files? I have TMPEnc MPEG Editor 1.x and was pretty satisfied with it for SD material. I also tend to run the files through VideoReDo before editing.

All the above applies to Windows -- it would be GREAT if I could find a good tool for Linux. Has anyone had experience with LVE?

2. Are there any converters that really work? When I last fiddled with this stuff, SUPER worked only about 20% of the time. Dr. DivX tended not to work and took a long time. People said not to even bother with Quicktime. Any new players in this area? Ideally, I would like to play the same file on the PSP as on XBMC.

And, like #1, any recommended converters for Linux?

The reason I would like to do it all on Linux is that is where the files end up so if I could have them on my Linux machine from start to finish, that would be preferable.

Thanks all!

[dburckh]

mencoder which is a part of mplayer works pretty well for a command line tool. It's super slow for encoding HD though. I think that's going to be pretty common. I believe it runs on linux.

You may have problems with HD. I've encoded stuff with mencoder that only plays on VLC and mplayer.

I don't know if your Xbox is going to be able to play any HD stuff unless you down scale them. Will it play HD Mpegs?

I haven't tried autoGK for Tivo HD, but that's what I use for DVDs. I believe it supports raw MPG.

Just a note, you probably want to avoid H264/AVC for a while yet. It takes a monster box to encode/decode them. I would stick with H263/Xvid.

[jkrell]

I don't know if your Xbox is going to be able to play any HD stuff unless you down scale them. Will it play HD Mpegs?

No XBMC will not play the HD MPEGs. It starts them, but then it skips. However I did manage to make an HD-Divx of one movie which played flawlessly on XBMC. That was a while back and I haven't had much success since.

[dburckh]

Last night I transcoded an HD MPG with AutoGK. It turned out much better than mencoder. Video was good, AudioSync was excellent. Here's what I did:


Extracted/converted to .mpg with TySuiteJ
Used AutoGK for conversion. Settings:

Target Quality: 75%
Output Audio Type: Original
Force deinterlacing when source was detected as hybrid*
Override input AR: 16:9*



*Press Ctrl-F9 to get to these settings

Notes:
AutoGK down converted it to 720p. DTV 1080i isn't true 1080i and most H263/Xvid players don't properly support anamorphic video, so I guess that's ok.
Took 6 hrs, 2 minutes, for an 1 hr, 22 min 8GB file on an AMD64 3700+

[captain_video]

VideoReDo works just fine with HD files recorded on my HDTivo. I don't have much experience with the other formats you mentioned but if you're looking to play them back on a PSP there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to view them in 480P or even lower resolution. The PSP isn't going to be able to use HD resolutions to the extent where you'll see any difference anyway. Check out HDTV2DVD for an easy to use utility that will convert your HD transport stream files (.ts) created from VideoReDo into a set of DVD compliant files at 720x480. You'll get a set of IFO, BUP, and VOB files ready to burn to DVD as well as a standalone mpg file of the full video.

There's also a method of creating your own HD-DVDs that will play back on any set top HD-DVD player or X-Box 360 add-on DVD player. The method uses your existing DVD burner and standard DVD recordable discs that are authored with Ulead DVD Movie Factory 5. Version 6 has just been released with AC3 support. AC3 is not part of the HD-DVD or Blu-Ray standard but the new version of DVDMF6 will allow you to use your existing AC3 soundtracks intact. They get converted to PCM with DVDMF5. The process is outlined in the HD DVD software forum of the AVS Forum.

Check out forums like Digital-Digest.com, Doom9.org, or Afterdawn.com for info on converting to other formats like DivX or PSP.

[dburckh]

I did a quick search. It looks like PSP uses H264/AVC. I tried H264/AVC with XBMC a couple of years ago. It didn't work well. The xbox has like a 766Mhz Celeron. Software encoding/decoding of H264 is very CPU intensive. I've found H263/ASP/Xvid works best for XBMC. I haven't tried anything HD on XBMC, but I've seen references to people doing it.

I'm working on uPNP for TySuiteJ, so I may break out my Xbox again this weekend. I'll try the 720p H263/Xvid file I created.

The long and short of it is you have a format problem. If you go with H264, you are going to have to shrink the resolution below DVD quality to play on PSP/XBMC. H263/Xvid might play HD on XMBC, but wont work on PSP.

My XBMC knowledge is pretty dated. H264 may have better support now, but it didn't work well back in the day. You can use Nero Ultra to make a quick MP4 file to test it out. They have 2 codecs. The regular one is H263, the one with AVC is H264.

[jkrell]

Thanks for the replies. I'll try these encoder recommendations this weekend. I am still hoping someone will know of a good editor for Linux. If I try LVE, I'll report back on how it worked for me.

Agreed, I do have a format issue. It looks like for now, I'll have two files for each film -- h264/avc for PSP and then h263/xvid for the home network.

I am also intrigued about the HD-DVD method mentioned by captain_video. I have the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive and that would be a good way to use these files (albeit not as convenient as having them on the HDD).

Hopefully, the Xbox 360 will soon be hacked and XBMC ported -- I imagine that will open many doors for this stuff.

dbkurch, check out XBMC 2.01 -- might include better support for h264 but I doubt it. Still, I successfully used DivX (which I think is h263) once a while back. Itching to try this again. Sounds like AutoGK might be the way to go for me, although I think it is strictly a windown app.

What would uPNP do for TySuiteJ? BTW, have enjoyed playing with TSJ so far and look forward to continuing.

[dburckh]

Tested out my 720p AC3 Xvid on XBMC 2.0.1. It played ok, but it dropped a lot of frames. This was noticeable, but not too annoying. Maybe if I dropped it down to 70% or lower, it wouldn't drop frames.

With XBMC 2.x and UPNP you will be able to see your Tivo titles from XBMC (or any other UPNP compatible client). It would require running my unreleased UPNP server. There maybe a way to do this with TWP too.

I have this working for SD Tivo files, I'm going to see if I can get HD working as well.

...back on topic

You can use mencoder, I believe that runs on Linux, but my experience is that autoGK is faster and easier to use. I don't claim to be a mencoder expert.

[dburckh]

This morning I dropped my Xbox down from 1080i to 720p and I was able to play my 720p Xvid-AC3-24fps .avi with no noticeable frame drop (it did still drop a few). This might be what you want to shoot for on HD conversion.

This also allowed me to stream HD from my UPNP server, but I had about 40% frame drop, but no audio problems. I tried to drop it to 480p, but it still dropped about the same number of frames.