i-am.ws

Sunday Sep 21, 2014

Tuning ffmpeg for MythTV

MythTV is my default way of watching television. It stores the content as MPEG2 files, the video with a bitrate of 6000 kb/sec and the audio with 384 kb/sec. For the purpose of watching the content outside of my home, I do post-processing to reduce the filesize such that it can be copied over the Internet. The tool of choice is of course 'ffmpeg' which has a large number of flags to control the output. I used -qmin, -qmax and -qscale to tune down the file size. For audio, the ffmeg help-page says that without flags the output will have the same quality as the input, which sounds good.

I started to dig deeper and discovered that what I was doing was far from optimal. On the video front the compression was so high that it resulted into those "quilt pattern" squares. Which I accepted as a fact of life, but while playing and testing, I found that I could get the same level of compression, but with a much better picture quality, by simply reducing the video bit-rate instead of using the qscale flag.

Then I discovered an even bigger issue with the audio. The default behavior (at least in my case) appears to be not to copy the audio bit-rate from the input file but to use 64 kb/sec, down from 384. And that results in big distortions, especially with music. I started experimenting and 128 kb/sec gives pretty acceptable audio, while the difference between 256 and the original 384 kb/sec can't be noticed with your average TV program.

So, here is how I am compressing now, which reduces the file size to a quarter of the original.

# ffmpeg -y -i file-in.mpg -vcodec msmpeg4 -b 1000k -ab 128k file-out.avi

Then I started to look at reducing the file size of those MPEG2's for archiving purposes. In this case quality decrease is of course not acceptable. I opted for MP4 as the format and got the following as a good compromise.

# ffmpeg -y -i file-in.mpg -vcodec mpeg4 -b 3000k -ab 256k file-out.mp4

I can't see the difference with the original and it shaves off around a third. Please notice that the video codec is 'msmpeg4' for avi files, while 'mpeg4' for mp4 files.

And now I will have to start recoding half a TB of video content :) ... that will keep my CPU busy for a while.

Calendar

Entries

Links

Navigation