Sunday, August 24, 2008

Converting MPEG-4 (h.264) Videos for Viewing with mvpmc

mvpmc is a media player running on the Hauppauge MediaMVP. Besides serving as a MythTV front end, it allows me to access multimedia content stored on a file server and show it on a conventional TV set.

Increasingly, TV content is archived in MPEG-4 format (example). Using ffmpeg, it can be converted to a DVD-like format suitable for viewing with mvmpc as follows:

ffmpeg -i xyz.mp4 -target ntsc-dvd -s 320x240 -acodec mp2 -ab 160k xyz.vob

Unfortunately, this conversion causes the file size to increase six-fold. Any suggestions to minimize the file size without introducing playback problems are welcome.

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