In Place Compression

[Diego Garcia]

If I compress an mpg recorded by Sage with an external compressor (e.g., DivX) in place (i.e., I replace the original mpg with the compressed version) will Sage pick up the change? In other words, if I go to play the show will it play the compressed file?

- Diego

[evilpenguin]

Yeah, but there's a process you need to follow...

1) Compress the video to a non-SageTV folder
2) Rename the compressed version to be the same as the original, just with a new extension (recording-0123123-0.mpg -> recording-0123123-0.avi)
3) Delete the original video.
4) Move the new video in its place.

Ideally step 4 works best if the video is on the same drive and the move is instantaneous (if you let windows copy the video, sometimes Sage will try to scan it while its still being moved). If you compress to another drive I recommend moving the video over as a .tmp file and then renaming it once its in the correct place.

[Diego Garcia]

Interesting. Between the time of my original post and your reply I experimented with doing something like that. Only I found that Sage didn't recognize the new file unless it also had the same file extension (mpg). No big deal, I suspect, at least using DivX.

It sounds like it might be "safer" to shut Sage down when doing the file replacement (i.e., after it's recompressed).

- Diego

[evilpenguin]

The file just needs to have an extention that Sage recognizes. You can just rename those .divx files to .avi and it'll work also.

Also, make sure you're on the latest beta as 6.4 had some bugs with inplace re-compression.

[Diego Garcia]

Thanks, I'll double-check the version I'm running. I just downloaded it on Saturday, so I think it's 6.5.

- Diego