Brighter Fusion Blog

Happy day for geeky me!

Today I took an HDTV 16:9 tv show that I acquired via BitTorrent and converted it to a 4:3 letterboxed, ReplayTV-friendly file. I poked a hole in my firewall to let the DVArchive server talk to the replays, and now they can stream the show!

It’s the beginning of the end of Comcast’s grip on this house! W00t!

(Not counting the Internet service, of course, at least until FIOS comes to town.)

The ugly (beautiful) details follow the jump.

Thanks to the PlanetReplay forums for the basic strategy of importing Internet video to DVArchive.

Thanks to Hokie Dave for the sample batch file using ffmpeg and rtvconvert from rtvtools to create Replay-readable files.

(Here is an alternate method to do the same thing. I’ll probably try that too.)

Thanks to rneily at TiVoCommunity.com for doing the math on the padding to go from 16:9 widescreen to 4:3 letterboxed.

It’s still higher resolution than I can see on a standard TV. (It’s super pretty, tho!) I might try reducing that to speed up the conversion and reduce file size.

Here’s my batch file for the AVI conversion:

@echo off
REM — Convert from FLV to MPEG-2
ffmpeg -i “%~1″.avi -target ntsc-svcd -acodec mp2 -ar 48000 -ab 192k -ac 2 -s 720×352 -padtop 64 -padbottom 64 “%~1″.mpeg

pause

REM — Convert from MPEG-2 to Replay-MPG
rtvconvert “%~1″.mpeg %~1″.mpg

If I ever get an HDTV, I can still use the Replays to record HD with a moderate reduction in quality. I would just leave the aspect ratio at the default. It will squish into 4:3 on the Replay and then stretch back out to 16:9 on the TV. People say that that doesn’t look too bad.

And look what else! It looks like the Roku HD1000 high-def media player (looks like it’s a DVR sans the hard drive) can talk to DVArchive and ReplayTV (which makes some sense, since Roku was created by ReplayTV’s creator Anthony Wood). This could be a nice accessory for the future, even tho it looks like it’s already a discontinued product. That Roku Netflix player looks nice as well. I wonder if it can be hacked to talk to DVArchive or Windows Media Center as well.

If the Replays are going to hang around for a few more years, I might spring for the quieter fan upgrade.