MPEG with LPCM audio to smaller but lossless format?

[SadaraX]

I have been capturing from my cable large mpeg's with lpcm audio on them. The mpeg's are quite large and I was wondering if I could convert them to another format that is smaller without loss. I am not looking to convert them into XviD or h264. From what I have read, HuffYUV looks promising.

However, my attempts to encode my mpeg's into HuffYUV only get me files with no audio. I need to end up with some type of lossless audio (LPCM/WAV/Flac) audio in my videos. Can this be done using HuffYUV and some video container?

On a side note, I am keeping these mpeg's around for backup purposes, I really need them to be stored without loss, because I often have to encode them to lossy formats like XviD with MP3/Ogg audio. I need them archived in as lossless format as possible.

[foxyshadis]

Why do you convert? Why not leave the mpeg as-is? Huffy will be much larger than the mpeg with no improvement, unless you're filtering first (and even then "better" filtering could always be done later if you kept the original).

As for audio, yeah, use opendml avi and save an audio stream with it. Not sure if you can save flac in it but definitly uncompressed multichannel wav. Conversion is still suboptimal though.

[setarip_old]

Hi!lpcm audio on them. The mpeg's are quite largeThe major contributing factor to your large filesize is not the video, rather it's the LPCM audio...

[SadaraX]

Why do you convert? Why not leave the mpeg as-is? Huffy will be much larger than the mpeg with no improvement, unless you're filtering first (and even then "better" filtering could always be done later if you kept the original).

As for audio, yeah, use opendml avi and save an audio stream with it. Not sure if you can save flac in it but definitly uncompressed multichannel wav. Conversion is still suboptimal though.

I basically was hoping for a way to store the files in a smaller format without loss. I was not aware that Huffy would increase the filesize.

[SadaraX]

Hi!The major contributing factor to your large filesize is not the video, rather it's the LPCM audio...

You are correct. Does anyone know of a way to have the mpeg audio with some lossless audio codec like flac together in some container? I don't think mkv or mp4 could handle though, though I should look into that....

[foxyshadis]

If you really need lossless, flac-in-mkv, mpeg-4 lossless, or Apple lossless in mpg/mp4 via dbpoweramp is the way to go. (Apple lossless is around the same size as FLAC but more compatible with mp4.) A high enough bitrate aac or mp3 could be perceptually lossless while saving even more space, but that's entirely up to you.

[Shoot, I guess only itunes encodes Apple Lossless.]

Here's a link to MP4 lossless (http://www.nue.tu-berlin.de/forschung/projekte/lossless/mp4als.html#downloads), btw, though I don't know of any dshow decoders yet. It's rather fast (around half the speed of flac) and somewhat smaller than flac most of the time. I'd wager it could use some optimization.

[slavickas]

Hi!The major contributing factor to your large filesize is not the video, rather it's the LPCM audio...
I highly doubt it... unless it's 6ch LPCM

[Slogra]

I have been capturing from my cable large mpeg's with lpcm audio on them. The mpeg's are quite large and I was wondering if I could convert them to another format that is smaller without loss.

You can't convert a lossy source to something else without loss of quality, unless you use lossless video like huffyuv which will be a lot bigger that the source. So you can forget about reencoding the video.

However the sound is lossless so might be able to convert that to flac and put it together with the video in some container... i've got no idea which container supports flac and mpeg together though.

Maybe it's better to keep 'm the way they are for compatibility's sake.

[Mug Funky]

yep, if you're just archiving these videos, don't convert them at all. the LPCM isn't taking up as much space as it could.

LPCM 48/16= 1536 kbps. mpeg-2 video needs a much higher rate than that without looking like poop, and i'm guessing your videos are closer to the 5000-7000 kbps range. just burning these source files to DVD should be sufficient for archiving (if they're bigger than 4.38 gigs, you might want to split them).

[SadaraX]

The average mpeg video bitrate 9900 kps. :)