Making Recordings Small?

[jgilland]

I have my SageTV recording going to a 200Gig SATA drive. After only a week of recording, it is darn near full. For each 30 minutes of video, I'm getting about 1.5Gigs of content. I was wondering if there was any easy (easy as in one program that does it all) way of reencoding the file to be smaller (like 60-100MB per 30 min) without losing too much quality? Thanks!

[dvd_maniac]

I use AutoGK for this, and it has batch mode so I set it up once every couple of days and leave it alone.
I want to archive ALL my favorite shows and this does it fast. I encode them to 300MB/hr and on certain shows I cut out the commercials after, leaving them to around 215MB for a one hour show.
I view these on my 57" Hitatchi HDTV and only notice a little drop in quality. On my client in the living room is a 36" SDTV and I do not notice any visual difference in quality.

one of the Cons for doing this is that you lose the show details.

[bgorrell]

If I'm not mistaken, you can recover the show details by keeping the original filename (even with the new extension) and setting the Created On timestamp (via a "touch" utility) to the start date and time of the recording and the Modified On timestamp to the end date and time. I do this to files after editing out commercials and it retains the show details. Another thread here discusses this ability. Basically, Sage is only concerned about the ShowID part of the filename and the timestamp.

[dvd_maniac]

Yes you can do that. But I find it a pain in the $%@#...
I hope version 3.0 will make show info exportable/importable.

[nielm]

Originally Posted by bgorrell

If I'm not mistaken, you can recover the show details by keeping the original filename (even with the new extension) and setting the Created On timestamp (via a "touch" utility) to the start date and time of the recording and the Modified On timestamp to the end date and time. I do this to files after editing out commercials and it retains the show details. Another thread here discusses this ability. Basically, Sage is only concerned about the ShowID part of the filename and the timestamp.

... yes, while Sage is shut down (see the HOW-TO thread in the customisations forum for details!)

[jgilland]

Originally Posted by dvd_maniac

I use AutoGK for this, and it has batch mode so I set it up once every couple of days and leave it alone.
I want to archive ALL my favorite shows and this does it fast. I encode them to 300MB/hr and on certain shows I cut out the commercials after, leaving them to around 215MB for a one hour show.
I view these on my 57" Hitatchi HDTV and only notice a little drop in quality. On my client in the living room is a 36" SDTV and I do not notice any visual difference in quality.

one of the Cons for doing this is that you lose the show details.

Thanks a ton! This sounds perfect. Are there any free commercial removers (ones that just kill the commercial content and dont reencode again)?

[dvd_maniac]

VirtualDub is free & fast. No re-encoding.

You can find both programs HERE on DOOM9.
or VirtualDub HERE
& AutoGK HERE

Just some advice...

Install both programs. Open AutoGK and you will see the Advanced Settings button. Click it and make sure it is CBR mp3, kbps 128, otherwise you'll get Audio sync issues when cutting out commercials. Set the Custom Size to whatever you want. I use 300MB for 1 hour show and 150 for half hour.

Finally hit input directory and pick your recording folder and that will automatically set up the output file name. The name will be the same with an .avi extention inistead of .mpg...You'll want to move it to another folder if you want to keep the show info as you'll have to follow the instructions for that.
Hit Add Job, Then start. Then you can repeat the process of adding more jobs to the queue.

For cutting out commercials there is a guide on Doom9. But basically you pick the begining and end points and when it's highlighted hit the delete button. When done doing it for the whole file, click Save As and make sure it says Direct Stream Copy so it won't re-encode. Try it and let me know if Doom9's guide was helpful enough.

For me it takes about 5 seconds to add a file to AutoGK queue, about 1- 1 1/2 hours to encode and about 2 minutes to cut out commercials.

[jgilland]

I reencoded about 10 files in AutoGK before I saw your post about altering the Audio Advanced Settings. I'm gonna try and cut the commercials without getting a synch problem. If so, oh well. I'll just reencode them. Thanks a ton!

[dvd_maniac]

VirtualDub will give you a warning about VBR audio when you open them. If it does then re-encode.

Happy shrinking.

[Rogue9]

dvd maniac,

Are there any other settings you change for AutoGK encoding? And do you do 1-pass, or 2?

I tried encoding a 1 hour show with it, in 2-pass mode, compressing to fit on a CD (700 MB), but it seemed to take a lot longer than an hour and a half. Granted, I didn't change anything in the advanced settings that I know of, but I was just wondering if maybe I was doing something wrong.

[dvd_maniac]

Sometimes, dpending on the source, the first pass is run twice. Check the log file for re-running first pass. This will make the encode take longer.

[Rogue9]

Ok, I made the audio changes in the Advanced Settings area that you suggested. Set up 8 files to be compressed last night before I went to bed.

It's still going....

Average time on the ones its done so far is 3 and 1/2 hours. Thats with 2 passes. One file actually had to re-run the first pass. That one took 4 hours and 40 minutes.

Is it because of my output size? I went with the 1 CD option (700 MB) because I don't know how it will look on my 51" HDTV yet. So I figured this would give me decent quality. I guess its not that big a deal, as long as I limit the number of files to be done at once, and set it up to run at a time when I won't be using the computer for a while.

Just curious about the durations. As I've always heard of AutoGK as being fast, and thats not exactly what I'm seeing so far.

[buzzerbee]

Actually, thanks to this thread I tried autogk and it's working pretty good for me. BTW did you remove the DAE program which is adware?
I take a 30 min show and remove the commercials with MPEG-VCR, which makes my starting file size between 450-500 MB roughly. Then using the suggestion above, I make it anywhere from 110-130 mb, depending on content. It looks pretty good to me. MOst of these are shows I might see once or twice more ever, so PQ is not very very important but I don't want awful playback either.

So my suggestion would be to take a small sample file. say a 10 min clip and reencode it using the various settings to find the min compression level you like. I think that in this situation you would have to compress it using the output file % size rather than fixed MB size. so in my case, I would take a 500 mb file and tell it to compress it to 25% of its size and if I liked, try 20%, if not try 30% etc. take the min level that looks good on your TV and use that as a guide to the final output size. you might find that a 1.5 orig file looks as good at 400 mb as 700MB. That might save you some time as well as space.

my compression of a 20 min show takes about roughly 45-55 min using default settings (# of passes) other than CBR described above and setting output to 110-130 MB as I mentioned and my PC is a couple years old.

edit- my default recording quality is DVD extended play

[dvd_maniac]

I have a 57" Hitachi HDTV and the 300MB\hour looks pretty good. You can cut out the commercials first to quicken the encoding but I myself find cutting out commercails MUCH faster in virtualDub after the encode.
BTW, what quality are you recording in? When I record in Mpeg-2 Max setting it takes longer to encode than when doing best quality.

[bgorrell]

I don't know about 300MB/Hr for me. I definitely see degradation from my default 700MB/Hr. It does seem to take forever though. About 3 or 4 hours for an hour long show. I think it is because of all the de-interlacing and fancy filters that AutoGK applies. It is going for quality over speed. I love the simplicity and output quality though. I'm just not sure I can stand the speed.

[Rogue9]

The original files were recorded with the "Best" Setting in Sage. I'm gonna try a few files at 350 MB tonite and see how long it takes and see what the PQ looks like. Guess I just gotta find a happy medium, heh.

Thanks for all the help and suggestions!

[bgorrell]

I've experimented some more, and settled on using CQ (1-pass) 75% encoding. I also switched to Auto for the audio. I don't think I need the CBR MP3s since I cut commercials with MPEG-VCR first anyways.

My results range from 450-600MB/hour and the quality seems every bit as good as my previous attempts. I'm averaging about 1.5 hours processing for a 1 hour show vs. 3.5 hours with the 2-pass method.

[dvd_maniac]

@ bgorrell

Just a thought here. If I was going to cut out the commercials first, which I do on a couple select shows, then I would reccomend using Nero Digital to encode. Every site and forum that did a codec comparison said that Nero Digital's ASP Mpeg-4 wins hands down in quality and is alot faster to encode than Xvid.

The only reason I use AutoGK at all is because it is very hard to cut commercials out of the .MP4 container which is what Nero uses.

Be careful if you burn and view on hardware players too...

[bgorrell]

You are right, Nero Digital beats Xvid hand's down. I'm hesitant to use it though because I've heard of the following drawbacks:

- Does not play natively in Sage (correct me if I'm wrong)
- Not supported by any other media players (no DirectX filter available)
- Not supported by any hardware decoders

So, I would have to launch Nero's player as an external application from Sage, right? Assuming that is the case, how seamless is switching back and forth? I would have to program my Hauppauge remote.ini to control the external player, but would I run into focus problems or anything?

Seeing as how Xvid is just strarting to get hardware decoder support, I suspect it will be at least another year before ASP starts to show up. I've been holding off on a PC based hardware decoder in hopes of better Xvid support as it is.

I really don't get why hardware developers like Hauppauge, ATI, and nVidia are dragging their feet on this. The market should be flooded with full-featured hardware decoders by now. It would seem easy enough to adapt from set-top DVD decoders that already provide Xvid, WMV and MPEG file modes and have S-video and Component outputs (and HDMI now I believe).

EDIT: The only files I'm converting to Xvid at this time are not for long-term archiving. Those will probably stay in MPEG-2 untill the rest of the industry moves on to Nero Digital support (and I'd love to see it in Sage first!).

[parkimar]

Hi,

With regards playing MP4 files natively in SAGE, I found it really easy. I set up MP4 as one of the recognised file formats for the import libraries.
Then I installed the 3IVX filter and ffdshow, and voila - takes a couple of seconds to start playing, but it does it fine from within Sage.

I've used Nero recode on a lot of DVD movies, that didn't have six channel surround sound - I use SPDIF out to an amp/decoder, so I would loose my full surround sound If I encoded in nero, as it doesn't keep the AC3 soundtrack.

I havn't used it yet for compressing my TV recordings, as the add media files option always presents me with a blank list (probably an issue with my installation), but it works great for DVD's.

Cheers

Mark