One thing I should've noticed in reading that Ubuntu Forum post, as well as the comments in the configuration file, is that noise reduction slows things down. I'm now running both transcodings with noise reduction (and de-interlacing) off, single-pass, quality level 6 (the default). Let's try this again.
Xvid: 2:25:18, 116MB
DivX: 1:47:44, 145MB
Good thing; any bigger, and I would've been out of space:
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 4925528 4672876 2444 100% /
Guess I should've been doing this on my data drive. Oops.
Finally, we are within the realm of possibility. But how, ultimately, is the quality? Well, the answer was pretty clear. XviD was pretty bad, very blocky, in both the two-pass version (which I set at a pretty unfair low quality, I admit) and at the Q6 one-pass version. DIVX was very watchable (on the 14" monitor; hopefully it does as well when it's hooked up to the 36" TV). Although, curiously, Media Player Classic on the XP workstation refused to play the 2-pass XviD and the no-noise-reduction DIVX files. Since they will be played on the MythTV box almost exclusively, I'm not too worried.
By the way, here's a fun fact I discovered while moving files around from machine to machine. scp over my 100Mbps home network transfers up to 10MBps, transferring the 2.2GB source file in 3½ minutes. For some reason, I could not get PSCP (PuTTY's SCP utility) to make the transfer to my Windows machine (curiously, even with the trailing slash, it treated the target directory as a filename and was unable to write), so I started with FileZilla, which can connect over SFTP. It estimated over 3 hours to transfer the file. I gave up on that and used PuTTY's SFTP client (PSFTP), which was able to complete the transfer in a "mere" one hour.
No comments:
Post a Comment