down-resing and burning HD to DVD?

[davezen2]

Has anyone had success converting TS files and burning to DVD?
Right now I'm de-muxing with Imuxer and then down converting the video with TMPGEnc before burning to a DVD. It comes out okay, but the video comes out a little soft. (Mind you I'm not expecting HD quality, buy I figure at least DVD quality should be attainable)  I'm trying to save a season and a half of American Dreams TS files on my hard drive.  Any suggestions?

[Mark Strube]

When in TMPGEnc, use the sharpen edges filter. Set both the horizontal and vertical settings at "50" and check the field base box. HD content is made for higher resolution screens, so that's why it appears softer when you make it smaller. This is why "edge enhancement" is an issue in some DVD transfers, they must sharpen edges to keep the picture from appearing too soft, but sometimes they go overboard.

Good luck! I'm in the middle of converting Strange Days HD to DVD... the existing disc has an ok picture but it's 4:3 letterbox... and I can't deal with that.  

[digdugm]

personally I just use HDTVtoMPEG2 to just strip out the commericals, preview and credits. I just burned the first 6  esp. of 24 on 8 dvds in full 720p 5.1. to me if its not  why do it. just my opinion.
good luck though, and please update if you find a better way. never know I might want to try it later.

[TPK]

Hello....

Sorry to ask some NewB questions here but:

What are you using as a source for your HD recordings, and how are you recording them in the first place??

What does 'TS' stand for??

I, too, am interested in recording HD content....  But I don't know where to begin...

[davezen2]

Personally, I'm recording via Firewire from my Motorola STB to my PC.

TS stands for transport stream

You can find a lot of useful information on this at the AVS forums.
(there's a link to that site on the homepage here)


Note to Mark:  thanks for the advice about TMPGEnc, things are coming out a lot nicer looking now.

[picopir8]

If you dont mind dishing out a few $$$ the easiest way to burn to DVD is simply buy a HD tuner card.  Most allow you to record either the transport stream or an AVI/MPEG file.  Just store a video file instead of the transport stream and burn that video file.  Since you are using a hardware decoder to convert the transport stream to video, the process will be a lot faster than if you found som TS->video file conversion script.

[Mark Strube]

Note to Mark:  thanks for the advice about TMPGEnc, things are coming out a lot nicer looking now.

Glad I could help! Another thing you might want to try, if you aren't already, is to process an inverse telecine. This means converting the 29.97fps 1080i content to 23.976fps... or in the case of 720p, decimating the framerate in 2 so you go from 59.94fps to 29.97fps, and then converting that to 23.976fps (in tmpgenc, once it's at 29.97, save project and then re-open that project, inverse telecine automatic setting - non-interlace source... in the case of 1080i content, choose flicker prioritized.) Note these tips will only work if the content is originally shot on film... so this will work for most shows and all movies... but not sports or other live content.

Then when you encode to dvd, you choose the film setting, so you get a little more bang outta your bitrate buck. (When it's encoding interlaced frames that takes a lot out of the quality.)