kevvie010 - You could, have it remove the ads - but I have found it pretty unreliable... In the tests I have done on ch9 / ch7 dvbt recordings - it found ads maybe once in every 6 or 7 blocks... I think that prg needs a little tuning for us Aussies.
As Arkay said, us mods have been using it for a little while... All I can say is fantastic.
Using the defaults as installed - I have saved 80gb in the last week. Yes I have been crunching hard...
On average I got between 40-60% savings in file sizes and to the naked eye on a 68cm tv absolutely no noticeable difference in quality. Sure I could change the paramaters and get better compression and notice some degrade in quality.
It was mainly kids stuff I tried compressing, and of the 80 odd recordings I tried, only 3 failed (as explained by Arkay in his post) - of course when they fail, it hangs the process, so you have to kill it and start again.... I am sure this problem will be improved...
It got aspect ratios correct everytime I tried it, and works well....
How I use it :-
- I use Dcut to remove the pre / post stuff to my recordings and ads if neccessary
- then process these files....
Result is a nice compressed file for archival purposes (and boy did I learn a lot - do you know there are actually 120 different episodes of bob the builder... but 201 episodes of bananas in pyjamas - wow!)
I found - for me - it takes about twice as long to process as to the shows length - ie. a 15 minute show takes around 30mins to process. Compression ranges were real strange - files ranged from 30% to 95% of the original file - averaging out at around just over half their size...
Guys I love it... all I can say is
Go Crunch yourself !