Direct or Auto Encoding...

[ThomasD]

My apologies if this has been asked before, but I've been looking a long time and haven't found an answer...

Does SageTV support encoding directly to DivX or h.264?

If so, great, where do I set that up? If not, how do you set this up to automatically encode and delete the original as the recording is finished? Do I need additional software to monitor a folder or to do the encoding?

I am familiar with retail/free encoding tools, but I don't want to do any of ths manually. I've also looked at some of the customizations that seem to do something like this, but they old and I'm not sure what I'm doing?

Any help is appreciated...

Thomas

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by ThomasD

My apologies if this has been asked before, but I've been looking a long time and haven't found an answer...

Does SageTV support encoding directly to DivX or h.264?

Sage supports recording to whatever codec your capture "solution" uses. For most SD tuners that means MPEG-2, but the HD PVR records in H.264.

As far as auto transcoding, I'll leave those questions to someone more familiar...

[ThomasD]

Ok, so I think I understand. SageTV is limited to recording what the capture driver on my WinTV-HVR-1800 gives it? Which means, I'd have to capture to MPEG-2 first and then convert to another format after? Is that correct?

Thanks for the reply,
Thomas

[Opus4]

You can choose to convert videos to another format, but to do so automatically, see the customizations forum, which has a sticky list of customizations.

- Andy

[ThomasD]

I've looked through the customizations and it's a little daunting. Any suggestions as to specifics for a nice setup to automatically convert to h.264 or similar?

With the newest version of SageTV, can I use something like DirMon2? Is that the standard? Could I get this to launch a transcoder? Some kind of command line utility?

[reggie14]

What you want to do is probably covered by the Auto Compress plugin. I've never used it, so I can't comment on how well it works. I think the SageMC interface has this type of functionality built-in, and there are additional plugins for SageMC that extend it (the Video Tools plugin comes to mind).

But, in general, I'd recommend buying a 1TB hard drive for $80 and avoid re-compressing shows.