How to compress recorded HDTV

November 12, 2011 4:05 PM

I have a Hauppauge WinTV950Q USB tuner that I use to watch over-the-air television (usually HD) on my laptop. I have tried to record shows (using the WinTVv7 software), but the files it creates are enormous .ts files, ~10GB per hour or more, which I can't save/burn/share. How do I compress these to some usable size? I've often watched TV shows which are ~500MB/h and the quality doesn't seem too degraded.
posted by pjenks to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Best answer: Handbrake should do the job on both Windows and Mac. The presets are quite straightforward too, but feel free to MeMail if you have any questions.
posted by raihan_ at 4:16 PM on November 12, 2011

raihan_'s suggestion is pretty much the best possible answer.
posted by wierdo at 4:21 PM on November 12, 2011

Response by poster: Thanks raihan_ and wierdo! I've started to look at handbrake. Can you give any quick rules-of-thumb for how you use that software and how long you expect a conversion to take (I'm trying out a test 2min file and it looks like it might take 30mins)?
posted by pjenks at 4:34 PM on November 12, 2011

Best answer: What kind of CPU do you have? I can get something like 180-200fps out of the i7 in my iMac, which is roughly 3x realtime, but my older Core 2 Duo based iMac was about realtime or maybe a little slower for the basic "convert to iPhone" preset. But generally, pick the input file, pick an output location, choose a reasonable looking preset for how you want to store 'em (is it important they stay HD or not? Otherwise I've been generally happy with the "Normal" preset..) and have it start transcoding the video.
posted by Kyol at 5:06 PM on November 12, 2011

Response by poster: Thanks for the details and experience Kyol. I have an Intel UL7300 1.30GHz. For this test, I just left everything as default. I'll play a bit more with it to see how to reduce the size... keeping HD is not at all important, I'd just like nice looking but relatively small files.
posted by pjenks at 5:11 PM on November 12, 2011

Best answer: It mostly depends on the output resolution. If you're making an HD encode it will take a lot longer than an SD encode. The computationally expensive part is encoding the file. Decoding is very quick, so if you cut down the resolution, it's that much less that has to go through the encoding pass.

If the content is widescreen and you'll be playing it back on the computer, I'd go for 720x480 (DVD) resolution at least. If you're going to be playing it back on a phone or whatever, don't go above the resolution of the target device's screen, whatever it may be. The extra information is useless anyway.

To get reasonable encode times out of that processor you may have to take it down even lower, though. You can probably get away with anything at least 640ish pixels wide (height depends on aspect ratio, of course) while still keeping decent quality for viewing on a 14-15" screen. That should give you 400ish MB/hour (or 350ish for an "hour" of TV with commercials cut)
posted by wierdo at 5:21 PM on November 12, 2011

raihan_: "Handbrake should do the job on both Windows and Mac. The presets are quite straightforward too, but feel free to MeMail if you have any questions."

Just a note. Handbrake is also available under Linux.
posted by Samizdata at 7:23 PM on November 12, 2011

Why don't you try MCEBuddy? It can shrink the recorded files and remove commercials, and do so automatically.
posted by BobbyVan at 8:00 PM on November 12, 2011