HD Videos are huge!

[Grant.Edwards]

Originally Posted by ericscottf

So i've got my new HDHR hooked up to help out with whatever is
available by clearQAM from fios It is getting things like jeopardy and
the popular prime time shows (the office, etc) So an hour of HD tv off
the networks is 5.5 gb! Jeopardy alone cost me 2.42 gigs today.

It is apparent that i can't get the tuner to drop files in of a
reasonable size through sage -- I'm assuming the tuner is just
dropping the video at whatever bitrate it is broadcast?

Correct. The tuner provides "as-is" whatever program-stream is sent
by the transmitter. It's not a video encoder (or transcoder), it's
just a tuner.

Is there anything clever i can do here to save space,

Transcoding.

or do i have to buy more drives or downconvert?

Or keep fewer shows laying about.

I've got regular old SD tvs, so i'm not intensely concerned with very
high def tv (although i do notice a difference between hd and sd on my
ancient tvs)

If your server's got the horsepower, then transcoding to a lower
resolution and "better" codec will save tons of space. That's what I
did before I got an HD TV (that was with MythTV, but that doesn't
really matter). You should be able to get down to around 1GB/hour
with good quality by re-encoding at 640x480 with MPEG4.

When i buy new tvs, i'll upgrade the drive array. Until then, what
should I do?

I'd try transcoding to a lower resolution using a different codec.

[ericscottf]

I'm a big fan of ffmpeg to h.264, any other recommendations?

Also, how do i handle the file process? Should i transcode to a different file name and then quickly delete the old file and rename the new one to the old name and hope sage doesn't notice? Will that cause anything bad to happen? Is sage constantly watching for deleted files and/or does it keep track of how big a file should be or what format it should be in?

[evilpenguin]

Check out mediaShrink, I wrote it specifically to do in place replacements of Sage recordings with compressed copies.

[ericscottf]

That looks neat, penguin! Will work with it tonight.

[wayner]

The built-in Sage transcoder can rename files and I use it in conjunction with SJQ to take a file that starts as an MEPG-2 with a name like DoraTheExplorer-FishOutofWater-123456.mpg and ends up as an MPEG-4 AVI (or iPhone compatible file) and is called \DoraTheExplorere\FishOutofWater.avi.

Rename files on you own might be a bit tricky and cause wiz.bin to become confused.

[ericscottf]

How do you trigger the transcoder externally such that sage will keep track of things internally?

[wayner]

There are several methods but Sage Job Queue is the most flexible although it is more sophisticated so it is a bit more work to get running. But it has the added benefit of being able to do lots of other tasks, such as commercial skipping.

[ericscottf]

Is sjq doing the swap, or the transcoder?

[wayner]

The swap is being done by the Sage Transcoder itself - SJQ just picks what files to transcode and tells Sage to start transcoding and defines what the output filename (and path) should be. You can tell SJQ to only transcode files from certain channels - you may not want to bother transcoding H.264 files since they are already in the best codec.