avi convert

[ramonw]

I would like to see an option to allow a saved program to be converted to a Beyonwiz compatible avi file format (eg xvid)

I understand that you can copy them off and use your computer but this is cumbersome.

The option should allow the conversion to occur at a specified time (eg 2am) as it will probably max the CPU.

[tonymy01]

Absolutely forget it. The processor in the Wiz is 200MHz... try converting a large transport stream file on your old Pentium pro or pentium MMX... see how long it takes. Try doing that with only 64Meg of RAM...
This is the processor in a dedicated consumer device, designed to hardware decode all sorts of things, but not software encode stuff. I would not expect any consumer device to support what you want.

Why do you want to convert it anyway? For your PC? Ok, you have a PC then, perfect, use PC software to do it, with bucket loads of CPU and RAM. You say it is cumbersome, but that isn't the fault of Beyonwiz, it records perfectly structured transport stream files which it plays perfectly well. If it is a matter of saving HDD space, then how about simply putting a bigger HDD in? HDDs are cheap, grunty power hungry RAM intensive CPUs are not (and need heat sinks, fans etc also).

See www.videohelp.com for many many tools to do what you want, some aren't cumbersome at all, of course if you want something for nothing, then you get what you pay for.

[glow]

I would not expect any consumer device to support what you want.
.

Doesn't the LIDIC or P2 AV input have the hardware to encode H.264 in real time?

[netmask]

I would not expect any consumer device to support what you want.
.

Doesn't the LIDIC or P2 AV input have the hardware to encode H.264 in real time?

and it's not really all that good at doing compared to a MPEG card in a computer or the now very ancient Dvico USB MPEG encoder. An experiment one can do if you have a LiDiC or P2 and another set top box - take the composite video and stereo audio into either the LiDiC or P2 and then compare the results to the internal native MPEG2 tvwiz or TS file and the output you get from an encoder.... 576i reencoded to H264 or 720i or p or 1080i processed by software in a computer with AutoGk or Handbrake et al.

[tonymy01]

The LiDiC is an analogue to H.264 encoder anyway, nothing to do with digital recompression.

[IanSav]

Hi Glow,

Doesn't the LIDIC or P2 AV input have the hardware to encode H.264 in real time?

Hardware encoding of an incoming analogue SD signal is a very different task from transcoding existing digital streams.

Regards,
Ian.

[peteru]

The internal DP-P2 architecture could accomplish a transcode from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 Part 10 (aka h.264) purely in digital domain, but it would probably end up being a special case scenario where the box could not be used for anything else while transcoding.

I seriously doubt that we'll ever see a firmware that does that.

[fredofrog]

Why not have a simple otion in Setup to allow for MPEG 2 or MPEG 4 recording like some LG products do rather than record in MPEG 2 then have to convert. It would potentially give the BW a massive increase in storage without upgfrading HDD's

[IanSav]

Hi Fredofrog,

Why not have a simple otion in Setup to allow for MPEG 2 or MPEG 4 recording like some LG products do rather than record in MPEG 2 then have to convert. It would potentially give the BW a massive increase in storage without upgfrading HDD's

This is not how PVRs work. They simply capture the digital data as broadcast. There is no time to do any transcoding.

Regards,
Ian.

[glow]

The Panasonic DMR-XW350 seems to allow recording in H.264 to make better use of what seems a relatively small capacity 250 GB hard drive. Ok it's not just a PVR, it's a DVD recorder that has twin HD tuners and costs more than a Wiz (or about the same as a DP-S1?). Anyway I was just trying to challenge what I thought was tonymy01's assertion that consumer devices wouldn't allow transcoding to a more efficient codec.

Even if transcoding meant the box couldn't be used for anything else, I'd agree with the OP - why not schedule this for the wee hours.

I spend a lot of time transferring Wiz recordings to PC, re-encoding them to save space and then archiving on an external USB HDD. I'd love a function where the Wiz did all this overnight. Even if the conversion was only real time it would still beat my current WizFX+ProjectX+Avidemux process.

I'd find such a transcoding function more useful than WizTV, even more useful than the DVD fixes.

[tonymy01]

But you are asking that the Wiz does this. The Wiz has a chipset that is just not designed for these functions. Even the digital video recorder/DVD recorder you quote does not transcode its saved files by the sounds of it. It has a dedicated chipset to do the on the fly compression etc so it can take analogue video and burn it to a DVD, so it has all the necessary bits in place to achieve some of what you are asking (but does it transcode its saved files from one format to the other?) I would say the first generation of DVD recorders with digital tuners actually decoded the DVB-T to analogue and fed this into the circuitry to record much like from the A/V inputs....(maybe they didn't, but the obvious progression from analogue tuner to digital tuner may have meant this simple change to design).
Totally different hardware doing a totally different thing. The wiz and 99.9% of PVRs simply dumps the broadcaster MPEG2 (or MPEG4 if this ever kicks off) transport streams to the HDD, no CPU involved, no on the fly encoding or anything. It just gracefully and with minimal effort feeds a filtered version of the tuner output to the HDD, no fuss, nothing to go wrong, all information is available on playback at a later time. A true "timeshifter" of digital TV... you get exactly the bits/bytes the broadcaster sent to you (including multiple audio streams where applicable, teletext where applicable, subtitles etc, perfect).
To re-encode to other compressed formats on the fly (like a DVD recorder obviously does as it has the chips in place to do this for taking in the various inputs to burn to DVD/dump to HDD) would require much gruntier chips, and this normally means fans (most/all DVD recorders use a lot more power and require fans to keep cool, do you want noisy fans in your home theatre setup?).

[glow]

The internal DP-P2 architecture could accomplish a transcode from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 Part 10 (aka h.264) purely in digital domain, but it would probably end up being a special case scenario where the box could not be used for anything else while transcoding.

I seriously doubt that we'll ever see a firmware that does that.

Before we discard this idea is it worth running by the Beyonwiz engineers in the beta forum? (without impacting the real-soon-now public firmware release) If not for the current models, perhaps for the next?

[netmask]

Try doing any precision editing on a MPEG-4 Part 10 (aka h.264) you will need a i7 8 core with heaps of memory and a very good editor. The really big advantage of MPEG2 is it's ease of editing. Hard disk space shouldn't be an issue as the cost has come down so much.

[prl]

Try doing any precision editing on a MPEG-4 Part 10 (aka h.264) you will need a i7 8 core with heaps of memory and a very good editor. The really big advantage of MPEG2 is it's ease of editing. Hard disk space shouldn't be an issue as the cost has come down so much.

Surely any recoding for editing in MPEG4 would still be bounded by the two adjacent I-frames?

[netmask]

Presently there aren't too many editors that can do frame accurate cutting like Womble or VideRedo etc for MPEG 4. A lot harder to cut commercials out without losing a bit of the outgoing program material and sometimes incoming. The latest SONY Vegas http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro is not bad but around au$800 not cheap.

In time of course they will be developed and faster computers become the norm. I still prefer to edit uncompressed avi but then you are talking *really* large files.

[prl]

Presently there aren't too many editors that can do frame accurate cutting like Womble or VideRedo etc for MPEG 4. A lot harder to cut commercials out without losing a bit of the outgoing program material and sometimes incoming. The latest SONY Vegas http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro is not bad but around au$800 not cheap.

In time of course they will be developed and faster computers become the norm. I still prefer to edit uncompressed avi but then you are talking *really* large files.

I wasn't trying to say it was easy, just that it shouldn't need to re-encode much data, which means that it shouldn't need all that much computing grunt.

[fredofrog]

My DVD Recorder records directly to the hard drive using MPEG 2 or MPEG-4 encoding. I just select beforehand which one I want and then it records as normal. One thing I can't do is burn to a DVD disc anything recorded on the HDD in MPEG-4. In saying this, it is only a analogue tuner but I can record directly from the tv's DTV broadcast and it works the same.

[IanSav]

Hi Fredofrog,

As we indicated earlier in this thread, modern PVRs do *not* encode the video in real time. Older DVD recorders work by encoding the *analogue* TV signal to MPEG using a specially dedicated MPEG encoder chip.

Regards,
Ian.