Welcome To Australia's No.1 Media Center Community!
You Are Currently Viewing As A Guest - you'll need to register in order to participate in our community and make this annoying message disappear!
By registering you'll be able to post & reply to questions, set up your own image gallery & blog, communicate privately with other members, create & respond to polls, access downloads and other "members only" features.
Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free - so why not join our community today - you'll be glad you did! If you experience any problems with the registration process or your account, please send a message to Mike
Server Upgrade Scheduled For Sat 20th / Sun 21st March - Site To Be Closed
I've been 'Crunching' for over a week now and all I can say is 'YUMMY'
Had good success with Crunchie during the beta period, My MCE box wakes up at 2am in the morning crunchies away the days recordings then turns itself off when finished. The space savings are great and quality on my 68cm TV is top notch!
It's easy to install, everything is logged so it's easy to go back and see where it's all at.
The exceptions are great, because I don't always want to crunch everything I record.
Well done Arkay!
Cheers
Matt.
__________________
Case: Silverstone LC16M (Black) CPU: Intel Core 2 6320 M/B: G/BYTE P35-DS3R Memory: 2 x Corsair 1Gb DDR-667 HDD: 1 x Seagate 320Gb SATA-2 Removable Media: Pioneer A07 DVD-Burner TV Tuners: Avermedia A16A & Avermedia A16AR Hybrid Power Supply: Seasonic S12 430W Case Fans: 2 x SilenX 90mm, 2 x Silverstone 80mm S/W: Windows Vista Ultimate
WHS
Case: Coolermaster 830 CPU: Athlon 64 3200 M/B: ASUS A8N-VM CSM Memory : 2 x Corsair 512Mb HDD: 1 x Seagate 430Gb SATA2, 2 x Samsung 250GB Spinpoint SATA-2
I'll give you an idea of some savings - it is always totally variable, and changes on each and every file... but from this mornings recordings, this is what crunchie did (the percentages are the avi file in size comparison to the original dvrms file)
Bear in Big Blue House 1,133,320 kb-> 611,739 (54%)
Bill and Ben 470,408kb -> 241,155 (51%)
Bob the Builder 471,561kb -> 174,102 (37%)
Little Robots 360,333kb -> 125,880 (35%)
All these were digitally recorded - and in using crunchie - I saved 1,348,746kb (Thats the equivalent of another 10 episodes of Little Robots crunched !!!)
Not too bad eh? Of course your results may differ... I find things that are old and grainy do not compact well, things that are fast and moving and colorful also do not pack well....
And again - to the human eye, no difference in quality really... Of course it may be slightly more noticeable on a large screen... but you must be realistic about the trade off - smaller file, something has got to be degrading somewhere...
Arkay mate you have done a great job... with all these other tools that just dont work - you found us a great solution that beats the lot - on price - on performance - on quality !
Ok, had a good go at it last night to see if it could handle some of the recordings which had a few reception hiccups in them.
No problems at all with any of the video.
What really surprised me is that it managed to convert a 20min DVR-MS to AVI in 15min. The DVR to MPG phase was really quick and XviD would have been going around 50fps to convert the MPG. Helps to have a 3.2G CPU but even if you are doing it overnight it should be completed by the morning on even the slower PC's.
Can't wait to see the XviD options become available as it would be nice to maintain the original resolution for when I'm viewing on the projector again. Even though dropping down to 640 x 360 for the AVI doesn't seem all that much you really see the difference when you go out to a high def projector. Lower res XviD just looks burred.
There are aspect ratio options in the XviD settings to instruct the player to force the AVI to play a 720 x 576 PAL video at 16:9 but I don't think WMP / MCE supports reading this info in the AVI. MPlayer / XBox Media Center is the only software I have at the moment which can act on the aspect info. So for MCE a resolution of 768 x 432 would be as close as you can get to maintaining the resolution and displaying the video with the correct aspect ratio.
One thing I haven't tried is to record HDTV (1080i without the sound) to see what Crunchie does with that. Imagine if it could split the fields from 25i to 50p and output a 1280 x 720 50p XviD-HD AVI! Nice! ... without the damn AC3 sound of course.
Anyhow, well done Arkay for the work you have put into this as it really caters to us parents who prefer to have the kids recordings taking up as little space on our hard drives as possible. Save the full res stuff for decent movies which we can output to MPG / DVD already.
Keep the good work up ... when you find the time (I know what it's like ).
Ok, had a good go at it last night to see if it could handle some of the recordings which had a few reception hiccups in them.
No problems at all with any of the video.
What really surprised me is that it managed to convert a 20min DVR-MS to AVI in 15min. The DVR to MPG phase was really quick and XviD would have been going around 50fps to convert the MPG. Helps to have a 3.2G CPU but even if you are doing it overnight it should be completed by the morning on even the slower PC's.
Fantastic
Quote:
Originally Posted by jgrouse
Can't wait to see the XviD options become available as it would be nice to maintain the original resolution for when I'm viewing on the projector again. Even though dropping down to 640 x 360 for the AVI doesn't seem all that much you really see the difference when you go out to a high def projector. Lower res XviD just looks burred.
Ok I knew this would come up which is why I thought about adding advanced options. You obviously know what your talking about with regards to encoding which is great. The first version of this though was written for those that don't know the ins and outs of video encoding So I have tried to apply generic options that should work well in the majority of cases.
However!! For those of you who do know how it works, understand aspect ratios etc and want a little extra control over things you can make these changes yourself. (At least until I put in the advanced options).
In the installation directory (c:\Program Files\Arksoft\Arksofts Crunchie) there is a good ol' .ini file. This file stores the encoding options for the xvid portion and also what values to use for the selected aspect ratio. Have a look in that file and you will see the scale values it's using for 16:9 content. Change it to whatever value you like but remember that it must be a multiple of 16!! If you're well versed with mencoder etc have a play with the other settings as well. It should all be pretty self explanatory if your know what you're doing If you break your config you can run the configurator and reset to defaults, re-set your paths and re-save the .ini file and be on your way again in a few seconds.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jgrouse
There are aspect ratio options in the XviD settings to instruct the player to force the AVI to play a 720 x 576 PAL video at 16:9 but I don't think WMP / MCE supports reading this info in the AVI. MPlayer / XBox Media Center is the only software I have at the moment which can act on the aspect info. So for MCE a resolution of 768 x 432 would be as close as you can get to maintaining the resolution and displaying the video with the correct aspect ratio.
Unfortunately MCE and the vast majority of other players don't make use of this
Quote:
Originally Posted by jgrouse
One thing I haven't tried is to record HDTV (1080i without the sound) to see what Crunchie does with that. Imagine if it could split the fields from 25i to 50p and output a 1280 x 720 50p XviD-HD AVI! Nice! ... without the damn AC3 sound of course.
That'd be real nice though from my research mencoder doesn't supply a true deinterlacer that can convert from 25i to 50p. It's the only true way of getting smooth motion. Maybe one day I'll rewrite it using avisynth and have all those lovely avisynth filters at our disposal.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jgrouse
Anyhow, well done Arkay for the work you have put into this as it really caters to us parents who prefer to have the kids recordings taking up as little space on our hard drives as possible. Save the full res stuff for decent movies which we can output to MPG / DVD already.
Keep the good work up ... when you find the time (I know what it's like ).
Thanks for all the feedback. Nice to know it's working Though I found a bug last night... Grrrrrr. It's only minor and likely to only ever happen to me but I'm fixing it anyway....
Forgot to mention also that you if you're using ffdshow for divx/xvid playback then you can apply resizing to your avi then apply smoothing/sharpening etc etc filters after the resize. The quality boost is pretty amazing.
All my divx playback is scaled up to 720x576 (keeping aspect ratio intact) before being smoothed and sharpened. I only have an SD set so only need to go to 720x576.
No reason why you can't do that to suit the res of the projector though and your CPU should be more than capable of some nice post processing on playback.
i have played with the .ini file mainly cos i dont need /like to keep huge files on DVD/HDD. So on the 2nd pass i set it to 1035 (from 5000) this forces a file size change downwards and i think it also creates fairly standard file sizes. ie a 42 minute tv show (no ads) is down to 340-350 Mb
Good stuff
Now if only the ads could be cut in auto i would be ecstatic.................................
Seriously though top stuff, well done, everyone boost Arkays points (i know it doesnt pay the bills though)
You should change both the bitrate numbers on the 1st and 2nd pass to the same value. The bitrate distribution should work better if both are the same I believe.
You should change both the bitrate numbers on the 1st and 2nd pass to the same value. The bitrate distribution should work better if both are the same I believe.
Didnt seem to make much difference changing the first pass setting (actually in TMPG you couldnt actually set the first pass bitrate)
But the quality was truly excellent
Have you used the ad remove tool in the DVRMSToolbox gui?? seems to hang at the last hurdle if i use it, was just curious if you had managed to get it to work at all
You're most likely right. First pass should only map the current bitrate distribution and ignore whatever setting you give it. It's the second pass that needs to re-distibute based on the info gathered in the first pass plus your desired bitrate.
I've had the ad cutter working in DVRMSToolbox. I've noticed though that DVRMSToolbox is affected by codecs installed and priority of codecs. I had to remove a few things from my machine to get it to work at all.
Re: Arksofts "Crunchie" Release (v1.0)
).
. I'll have a go at the INI tonight.
