Record divx or xvid directly? (1 Viewer)

[Kaki]

Hello

Is it possible to make Media Portal capture tv directly to divx or xvid?

I am used to using Showshifter, which unfortunately doesn't support my current integrated Tv tuner, but after having migrated to MP, I desperately miss the the obtion to record in xvid or divx.

I am aware MP is supposed to have automatic post-compression, but I cannot make it work, neither xvid or wma. And I would think it would bring my machine to its knees anyhow, if compression runs in the background while using MP simalotaneously.

Greetings from a newbie

 

[Taipan]

Is it possible to make Media Portal capture tv directly to divx or xvid?

Unfortunately, it is not possible to do this directly. MediaPortal uses the MS "stream buffer engine" which only records in "dvr-ms" format. You can of course, convert to divx or xvid later.

This will change when the new TV engine is released, though....

 

[ziphnor]

DivX and Xvid compression is too CPU intensive to do it on the fly(for most computers anyway), and you would have to do the compression in a single pass(you cant do multiple passes unless the whole video is available and most likely also using constant bit rate giving you a lower quality recording than you would otherwise expect from DivX/Xvid.

The new TV engine will record transport streams, recording to a simple video format like DivX or MPEG-2 is not acceptable as it strips off the extra information included with the transport stream delivered by the (digital) tuner card. Not sure what will happen for analog cards.

 

[Kaki]

As mentioned, divx on-the-fly worked well for me, using Showshifter on my Pentium M 1.6 GHZ laptop and a software-encoding based analogue card. And I was very happy with the quality, which to me looked better than post-compressed MPEG recordings from MCE and MP.

I am not aware though, if it is even technically possible to record divx on the fly with a hardware-encoding based analogue tv tuner? Never used this type of tv tuner. And I am even less aware if it is technically possible with a digital tv tuner?
But what about a tv tuner which has a hardware-based mpeg4 encoder, analogue or digital, does that exist and is supported generally (MP and MCE)?

I just find it too space-, time- and quality consuming to record in mpeg-format. The hardware aspect of the general world of consumer pc's (size of harddrives, especially in a laptop) just doesn't correspond to to the software aspect.

Having said that, I am very impressed with the vision behind MP, and I'm glad to have found a piece of software that supports my tv tuner.