Hi all,
I'm considering switching from that nasty Vista ( 
) 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
