WTV Transcode Settings

[pir8radio]

I recall seeing a topic on this already, but couldn't seem to find it again....

What are the proper ffmpeg settings to transcode a WTV to FLV... i have this set now : ffmpeg -ss %o -i %s -async 30 -b %bk -r 23-.976 -s %wx%h -ar 44100 -ac 2 -v 0 -f flv -vcodec libx264 -preset fast -threads 0 -
But my videos look like crap... too compressed or something. i "THOUGHT" when i first put this in the video looked good... but i cant for the life of me get a good looking wtv playback now.

I tried changing -preset fast to -preset superfast no change in quality..

Can someone explain what each setting in the above string does? And confirm that i have the correct settings in place.

Telling me what each setting is for, or directing me to a list would be awesome. I would rather know how it works and fix it, rather than just change something and make it work.

[bushman4]

http://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html#Options

Glenn

[pir8radio]

well, i have tried to change a few things, and my converted wtv's still look like crap, no matter what bandwidth i choose. ANyone have any ideas to get wtv converted to flv at less compression?

[GJ51]

I use:

ffmpeg -ss %o -i %s -async 30 -b %bk -r 23-.976 -s %wx%h -ar 44100 -ac 2 -v 0 -f flv -vcodec libx264 -preset fast -threads 0 -

Default playback is set to 5000kbps

I've been running WTV playback for years without major problems, but it does take good cpu power and bandwidth to get smooth playback at 5000kbps.

I'm currently using the latest release of Madsonic, but I've also had good results with Subsonic 4.7

Have you adjusted the player to try higher bandwidth?

Do your WTV files play well on other players? How are you saving the WTV files? 1080i format?

There are many variables involved in this process that can affect final output quality but high quality WTV playback is certainly doable with Subsonic. I have almost 10TB of WTV that I access with SS all the time.

One of the advantages to the Madsonic version is that you can adjust the default video playback bandwidth and you can also adjust it to as high as 15000kbps. Just for fun I opened the same WTV in one monitor on WMC and on another identical monitor using Subsonic at 15000kbps. Except for minor color variations that are inherent on muti-monitor systems I couldn't distinguish playback quality between them.

You have to remember though that my system may not be a good baseline for comparison as I'm feeding the video from a hos machine that has dual quad core Xeon CPU's. and has 16GB of ram. Pushing the same video quality with lower spec hardware can cause buffering and frame rate issues which is probably why the default in SS is set to 1000kbps. Even at that bandwidth, my experience has been that you'd want at least a quad core cpu.

YMMV

[pir8radio]

I have a similar setup as you.. I have an HP ML350-G5 with dual quad xeon's and 16GB of ram, my cpu's may be slower than yours though, mine are E5335's at 2.0Ghz but they have a decent amount of l2 cache, and the ram is error correcting.

I think i copied your trans code settings from a previous post on the forum, but i will recopy them and try again.

Yes i have tried selecting a higher playback rate.. I also have REMOTE POTATO installed and the videos play well on their web interface. also I am recording the wtv's at HD so they are pretty large files 3-10 gig depending on show length.

[GJ51]

You should be fine with your hardware. Especially if you're only trying to get good playback with one recording at a time to start. I did some testing last night and started to hit upper limits watching 3 WTB files at the same time at 10000kbps. I could also do 4 @ 5000kbps more than that and I start to get some buffering. My host machine is also running two Hyper-v sessions concurrently so whatever load they have can also affect performance.

One other thing that may be a factor. I use the war installation on Tomcat which I think I moved to for better performance a long time ago. You should still get good results with a standard Windows install, but I've found the war version to work better overall.

If you run SS 4.7, latest Java ver. and you don't have any other heavy load on the CPU, I can't think of any reason why you wouldn't get decent WTV performance with your hardware. Most often when we don't understand why there's a problem, it's not being caused by what we know, but by what we haven't been told yet. Can you think of any other configuration of either hardware or software that could be a factor that we haven't discussed yet?

[pir8radio]

Here, this is what modern marvels looks like full screen (bottom right corner not full screen capture). My movies that get converted from mpg, or mkv look awesome, but i can barely read text when wtv's convert. I cant think of anything, im not running any other real load other than WMC but that uses maybe 10%cpu with 2 extenders going and a show or 2 recording.

[pir8radio]

Well, not that the hardware is an issue..... but my impulsive A$$ just bought one of these from ebay, real decent price too: http://www.ebay.com/itm/140906959770
that should take care of future expansion for a while...

Well, if anyone has any input, i'm still hunting for a reason my wtv's look crappy like my previous post shows.. Again thanks for everyone who has read so far, and thanks to those who have tried to help so far.. PM me if you want access to help troubleshoot.

[pir8radio]

no other suggestions? Because that section of screen shot above isn't normal right?