A simple tool for archiving DVB recordings?

[ziphnor]

Hi,

I have an HTPC with DVB-C tuners from which i record SD and HD MPEG-2. Right now my mediacenter program(MediaPortal) records in DVR-MS(though it will record to .ts soon).

I record quite alot, and especially the HD recordings take a large amount of space. I would like to use my other PC(Core 2 Duo @ 3.0Ghz) to archive these recordings, but i would like to avoid to much manual labor for each file.

For most files i need to:
1. Crop black bars ( doesnt need to be automatic, as long as its easy to do)
2. Edit commercials and pre/post-record away (again not necessarily automatic, but would be nice with help in locating commercials).

Furthermore i would like to:
3. De-interlace during transcoding IF it can produce results superior to what a standard video card can do a playback time.
4. Be able to apply any potential beneficial filtering techniques (im not sure which, i was hoping for some suggestions :)
5. Possibly re-scale 1080i HDTV to 720p(the native res of my display) if it makes sense.

Is there a single program or at least just a few programs that can be set up once to handle this kind of thing(its okay if it takes a while the first time) while minimizing the time spent by me(not my PC ;) on each recording?

I have so far tried TMPGenc Express 4 (trial) and it does give me 1+2 as well as some simple options for 3 and 4, but i was maybe hoping for something cheaper with slightly better options.

Thanks for reading, hope my questions are not too stupid :)

[Turtleggjp]

In my experience, the most difficult part, in terms of work by me, is #2. How much time this costs you depends on how perfect you want to be. I'm sure there are programs to help with this, but I highly doubt any program will be able to be 100% accurate all of the time, which is why I do all of my editing myself. As far as the others:

#1 can be time consuming the first time, but usually if you can figure it out for a given channel, the same settings usually apply to all programs on that channel. Again though, you can be as precise or as simple as you want.

#3 is recommended, though again may be tricky to get right the first time. Once you find out what works, it should again stay constant for a given channel or show. Watch out though, because every once in a while I run across something that I need to go back and figure out a new technique.

#4 can be a delicate art that I myself do not go into. Again try to find something that you think works good and run with it.

#5 should be easy, assuming that #3 goes well. If you display is this resolution, you should be able to reduce your bitrate by about half by resizing to 1280x720 (assuming you came from a 1080i source). Anything SD you should probably just leave at its native resolution (adjusting for aspect ratio if necessary though, like 720x480 -> 720x540 or 640x480).

As far as a program to do all this, you might check out something like AutoGK. Personally, I like to get my hands dirty and handle all the stuff myself, but if you are doing a lot of this (or if you don't have the patience that I do), then a more automated approach would be better. Perhaps others can comment further on these tools, since I've never tried to use them. The only thing to watch out for is how well these programs handle errors that may pop up in your recordings. Such errors can cause A/V sync issues if they cannot be handled correctly. Good Luck

Matt

[spanky123]

For #2, maybe give VideoRedo a shot. It's got an Auto Add-Scan function that's almost perfect most of the time.

In fact, I think this is exactly what you want to be reading- Wiki (http://wiki.dvbowners.com/index.php/Web_Scheduler/Complete_Post_Processor)
And here's the forum (http://forums.dvbowners.com/index.php?showtopic=6888)
That's mainly for WebScheduler. I reccomend you use that for scheduled tv recordings. I'm sure you could get it to work with MediaPortal.

[popper]

Hi,

I have an HTPC with DVB-C tuners from which i record SD and HD MPEG-2. Right now my mediacenter program(MediaPortal) records in DVR-MS(though it will record to .ts soon).

I record quite alot, and especially the HD recordings take a large amount of space. I would like to use my other PC(Core 2 Duo @ 3.0Ghz) to archive these recordings, but i would like to avoid to much manual labor for each file.

For most files i need to:
1. Crop black bars ( doesnt need to be automatic, as long as its easy to do)
2. Edit commercials and pre/post-record away (again not necessarily automatic, but would be nice with help in locating commercials).

Furthermore i would like to:
3. De-interlace during transcoding IF it can produce results superior to what a standard video card can do a playback time.
4. Be able to apply any potential beneficial filtering techniques (im not sure which, i was hoping for some suggestions :)
5. Possibly re-scale 1080i HDTV to 720p(the native res of my display) if it makes sense.

Is there a single program or at least just a few programs that can be set up once to handle this kind of thing(its okay if it takes a while the first time) while minimizing the time spent by me(not my PC ;) on each recording?

I have so far tried TMPGenc Express 4 (trial) and it does give me 1+2 as well as some simple options for 3 and 4, but i was maybe hoping for something cheaper with slightly better options.

Thanks for reading, hope my questions are not too stupid :)

crypto's cutter TSConverter (works with AVC)is very good for messing with several DVB formats including ts , infact he's just made a post about how to convert bbc HD H.264 TS to AVI here
http://dvbportal.dyn1.de/forum/index.php?topic=732.0

theres also the AVC GUI encoder MEncoder264 http://mulder.at.gg/ that seems to auto remove the black bars from my mpeg2.ts testing files and again outputs to avi, or mp4.
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=803024#post803024

theres also HDTVtoMPEG2 than can cut mpeg2 files.

[Pookie]

Comskip works pretty well these days at removing commercials. Free, as well.

If you want to save time, get a copy of Videoredo.

[Your_Idol]

Unfortunately there is no simple solution. To do all the things you mentioned you will need:
ProjectX (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115063) to clean the recordings,
DGIndex (http://neuron2.net/dgmpgdec/dgmpgdec.html) to get the video into avisynth,
Belight (http://corecodec.org/projects/belight) to encode the audio,
avisynth (http://www.avisynth.org/) to deinterlace and crop and filter,
VirtualDubMod (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=65889) to edit out commercials and feed the video to xvid.

The commercials are the most time consuming, sometimes I just leave them in, you don't need to fiddle with the audio ether.

[squid_80]

Unfortunately there is no simple solution. To do all the things you mentioned you will need:
ProjectX (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115063) to clean the recordings,
DGIndex (http://neuron2.net/dgmpgdec/dgmpgdec.html) to get the video into avisynth,
Belight (http://corecodec.org/projects/belight) to encode the audio,
avisynth (http://www.avisynth.org/) to deinterlace and crop and filter,
VirtualDubMod (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=65889) to edit out commercials and feed the video to xvid.

The commercials are the most time consuming, sometimes I just leave them in, you don't need to fiddle with the audio ether.
I use almost the exact same line up of programs (note: they're all free!), except I do the audio encoding within virtualdub. Also my avisynth script has some stuff to log the numbers of any solid black frames to a text file which I use to chop out commercials.

[Your_Idol]

squid_80 have you tried belight because I like the extra options it has.

Can you please post your avs script, it sounds good. Is it slow looking for the black frames?

[squid_80]

It's a one-liner:
WriteFileif(last, "g:\blackframes.txt", "(YPlaneMax < 39) && (AverageLuma <= 17)", "current_frame")
The WriteFile functions are a bit buggy, it's safer to put the complete path to the output file rather than just the name. You might need to play around with the YPlaneMax value, 39 is what works best for me.
Normally I load the script into virtualdub, switch to direct stream copy and run a video analysis pass. For SD resolution it takes about 5 minutes to scan a 1 hour capture.

By processing the audio in virtualdub I don't need to fiddle with the audio either since video and audio are cut together.