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General => Users => Topic started by: nowandever29 on November 16, 2007, 01:33:43 am

Title: TV storage format and size, compression???
Post by: nowandever29 on November 16, 2007, 01:33:43 am
Hi all,

I'm considering switching from that nasty Vista ( :P) media center for my PVR in my living room.  I'm going to test out LinuxMCE, but I have a couple of questions:

- What format does LinuxMCE store recorded TV shows to?  Is it compressed?  Is compression available?
- How much space does it take to store a one hour standard def TV show?
- What formats are supported for video?  For instance, if I convert all our existing MS-DVR TV shows to XVid, will LinuxMCE "like" them?

Please respond if you can answer any or all of these.
Title: Re: TV storage format and size, compression???
Post by: tschak909 on November 16, 2007, 02:16:08 pm
Hi all,

I'm considering switching from that nasty Vista ( :P) media center for my PVR in my living room.  I'm going to test out LinuxMCE, but I have a couple of questions:

- What format does LinuxMCE store recorded TV shows to?  Is it compressed?  Is compression available?
- How much space does it take to store a one hour standard def TV show?
- What formats are supported for video?  For instance, if I convert all our existing MS-DVR TV shows to XVid, will LinuxMCE "like" them?

Please respond if you can answer any or all of these.

* This depends on the tuner card selected, and if you are choosing to transcode the files after they've been recorded. Most of the time, if you're using a tuner card with MPEG-2 assisted hardware (i.e. the Hauppauge PVR-150/500/PVRUSB2), the files will be standard MPEG-2. Other devices now are MPEG-4 assisted (the Plextor devices), so the files will be in that format. Other generic cards will typically be Nuppelvideo container files containing either MJPEG or MPEG-4 streams.

* With mpeg-2? It takes me about 2.5 gigs.

* Pretty much anything Xine will play is supported. But I would stick with MPEG, AVI, MKV, DVD images, MP4, etc. You will have no problem with files encoded with the DivX or XVID codec.

-Thom