High Quality encoding of SD .ts as archives

[cfriedl]

Wow ... a lot has changed in 3.5 years since I last logged in. :confused:

I have about 300 GB of Standard Definition transport streams captured from TV which I want to trim and encode to something somewhat smaller. I'm not likely to view them on PC. My main objective is to encode for hard disk storage *they're cheap and don't take up much space) and also encode to a high quality so that when I want to watch them again I can re-encode to DVD with little quality loss.

I've discovered Project-X for trimming and indexing my .ts files. Seems like x264 encoding is the way to go and Staxrip will help me out with this. But I'm clueless on setting bitrates/file sizes/quality metrics to achieve a good archival encoding suitable as a source for future mpeg2 (DVD) encoding.

Can anyone offer some advice?

[Guest]

Store them as is on an external USB drive. Storage is cheap now and there's no point to transcode them to another format when you plan to re-encode for DVD anyway.

[cfriedl]

That was the answer I knew someone would tell me and which I thought I didn't want. However you caused me to rethink and frankly that is in fact the best option when I weigh up the time and cost involved in the alternatives. So ... :thanks: