Hey.

 Recording an hour of BBCHD takes up around 10 gigs of hard drive space.. I've been looking (on the entire internet, it seems) for ways to convert h264 .wtv files into .mkv's or .mp4s of anything.. Anything that'll let me use x264 to reencode these files and save space..

I've come up pretty much blank.

Most of the tools don't seem to work with h264 .wtvs, but will work fine with mpeg .wtvs.

Anyone got any pointers for me?

Actually. I don't need an automated utility.

 Just something that'll demux the .wtv into the audio and video streams.

 Is anyone working on such a util?

Thanks

 

DVRMSToolbox will do a conversion from h.264 .wtv to .mkv.

I used the High Quality MKV profile as a quick test (I had to edit the profile to set audio to ac3 rather than native, otherwise I had no sound).

I also turned off the .srt subtitle generation option.

The aspect ratio ended up wrong on my test (looked like 4/3).

I haven't had time to play with the different settings yet, so I just used the zoom setting in media center to play the file back.

I had a 38sec recording, wtv filesize was 78.5MB, after conversion to mkv, filesize was 27.7MB

More testing is needed before I start archiving a lot of stuff

Edit:  I re-ran the conversion after entering 1920x1080 for the width and height in the profile editor and the file came out at the correct aspect ratio

Ahh. Have you got a download link and version number for that?

I tried looking for that this afternoon but only found the older version that handled dvr-ms files.

 
Thanks!

:)
 

I'm running the early access 1.2.2.0 build, I think the 1.2.1.9 build will work though.

http://babgvant.com/files/folders/dvrmstoolbox/entry14770.aspx

Thanks for the tip.. The clips I've tried have converted..

 But aren't viewable in Media Player Classic HC. Or anything in fact.. Only seem to play in VLC.

 The sound works, but the video doesn't.

Maybe it's because I'm using the earlier version?

I have the standalone mpcvideodec.ax file registered, as I use it for some file types in media center - not sure if that comes into play or not perhaps?

Have u tried TMPG Encoder? i think i've converted BBC HD to Mp4 with that but not positive!!

Quick look t TMPGenc's website didn't mention .wtv's at all.

 :(

Well. I finally got DVRMStoMPEG working.. But not on my "main" PC. I had to run it on my HTPC - a shame really because the main PC is a quad core scream-machine.

Anyway.

There doesn't seem to be any way to set the aspect ratio of encoded .mkv files from within DVRMStoMPEG. Nor is there a way to enable 2-pass encoding. Or am I just being thick?

Another question..

My converted files all have the wrong audio track converted with them by default.. I don't really want or need audio-described files - but this is all I get. Hmm.

Is there no filter you can use in Graphstudio to just DUMP the streams to disk?

I bit the bullet and bought powerdvd9 for it's decoder.

I only had time for a quick test, but graphstudio did build a graph using the cyberlink video decoder and the ms audio decoder + ac3filter for the audio - I got sound, but no video.

I don't have a lot of spare time at the moment, and had to remote desktop in while her indoors was watching tv to try - that could well be the problem!

This could be a way of getting to the audio stream that you want (I only get the main audio stream and not the secondary one).

I've been playing around with the "dump.ax" filter and GraphStudio.

dump.ax will ouput the audio just fine. But the video doesn't get written correctly.

Boo. 

You just beat me to it - I have also used the dump.ax method (I stumbled across it while looking at Tivo stuff!), but I get video and audio perfectly

I have also run the two files through tsmuxer and made a .ts file that plays back ok, even the win7 thumbnail generation works - in the correct aspect ratio!

Are you running the output from the PBDA DTFilter and PBDA DTFilter 0002 straight to the output file?

I found that if I kept the MS DTV-DVD decoders in the graph then I had problems.

I'm not sure what I've done, but I'm also getting both audio streams in any converted files now.

We need to get a splitter into the graph to recognise the two audio streams I guess, I tried haali but no joy so far.