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Arksofts "Crunchie" Release (v1.0)
this thread has 117 replies and has been viewed 58314 times
Not at the moment although I have had that question asked a number of times already as some people use other recording software that records in direct mpeg.
It wouldn't be overly difficult to make crunchie check the file extension. If it's dvr-ms then convert that way. If it's mpeg just do the xvid conversion.
I'll add it to the "to do" list which I have to say hasn't progressed at all this week!
Not as easy to implement as it might seem. Mencoder does have an option to automagically calculate a bitrate with the intent of the final output size being specified but I'm yet to play with it to see if it works. If it doesn't then you need to know the length of the clip and the size of the audio portion in order to calculate a video bitrate that will fit it to a given size. It's difficult and prone to error and might not be possible for a "generic" encoding tool which this is designed to be.
If/when I get a chance to investigate I'll see if mencoder can do all the above. If it can then it's a possibility.
As you can see though the requests for enhancement are mounting and I have a very limited amount of time at the moment... Day jobs get in the way of all the fun don't they!
There are some things that affect the final output size. One of those is the content of the clip. Some things compress well, some things don't. It depends on the amount of motion, colours, whether it's 4:3 or 16:9 etc etc.
The controlable things you can change to get a smaller size is the bitrate used, the output scaling used (i.e. you could scale from 720x576 to 640x288) at a bitrate of 678 (default) which saves space... but loses quality...
the TV shows on the 'net (nudge, nudge) not that i ever download them (someone told me this)
are usually encoded to 624 x 352 @1036 kbps this gives a file size of around 350Mb for a 42 minute show (ie standard 1 hour show less the dreaded commercials), this is using the two pass settings
Quality is usually pretty good considering, i mean generally you are only going to watch it maybe once or twice, if its something you really want to keep as best then record it to a DVD
Download shows off the net??? Hmmm. Never heard of that before!!
The idea behind this is to shrink things down to about half they're size. That at least gives you the option to wait twice as long to watch things.
Personally I don't think the quality of such downloaded files (so I'm told) is as good as I'd like it to be. It's great for file sizes to be so small but when you have the original, want more space and want to maintain quality then there's nothing wrong with keeping the res with a higher bitrate to watch later
I have benn running the program for about a week now. It normally works fine, but some shows on the ABC wont play. I have run GSPOT and it says the files are fine.. HELP!!!
