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Forum Discussion
Interested in buying ReadyNAS for use with Tivo
I am interested in purchasing Ready NAS product for use with Tivo. Is there a ReadyNAS product that is recommended? I only have 1TB of media which is mostly MKV, AVI, MP4. Does the ReadyNAS ...
I believe Plex works with Tivo Roamio. But you need at least an RN200 series to do real-time transcoding with Plex.
-The Roamio (and ReadyDLNA) both support mp4, so I am thinking your problem might not be what you think.
However, assuming that transcoding to mpeg-2 is required for some reason:
-I'm puzzled on why you are using -qscale together with -crf. My recollection is that -crf only applies to H.264 encoding, not mpg2 encoding. And crf/qscale are aiming at the same thing (constant quality encoding). So you should only need one of them in the command line.
-"Better settings" depends on your purpose. If you aren't keeping the files around after viewing, then I think your settings are fine.
But if file size matters to you, you can try larger values of qscale (say between 5 and 9). That will give you smaller file sizes. Basically gauge the quality by eye for a few qscale settings, and pick the largest qscale that has no visible quality dropoff.
-You can certainly get smaller file sizes still (doing 2-pass encoding, and maybe even trying to transcode to another MP4 (H.264/aac audio).
Yes, Plex does work with Tivo Roamio. I was going to give that a shot next and I'm not expecting real-time transcoding with the N104.
As to DLNA, I copied various mp4's to my N104 and the Tivo only could see the mpg's (The mp4's don't even show up in the list). If anybody has a ffmeg command to produce Tivo mp4's, I'd be happy to try it out.
I did verify that FF/RW doesn't work, even when the file is fully downloaded on the Tivo. Maybe this would be resolved with a better mpg conversion?
Thanks for correcting my mistake, the commands should have been:
ffmpeg -i "MyVideo.mp4" -qscale:v 1 "MyVideo.mpg"
ffmpeg -i "MyVideo.mp4" -crf 18 "MyVideo.mpg"
But I really have very little idea what I'm doing here... ffmpeg options are bit overwhelming. Some other more "standard" options I tired produced very poor video quality, so I ended up with the above. But your are correct, I wasn't keeping the files around after viewing. They end up being larger than the source file.
Thanks for the help.
Most of the more complicated options don't really matter in your use case. your qscale:v 1 option is constant-quality at the highest setting. If file size doesn't matter, and they play on your TiVo then you should be fine. Newer codecs would give you smaller file sizes, but likely won't give you better quality.
crf -18 for H.264 is the best quality in what some call the "sane" range. But I have no idea what it does with mpeg-2.
Perhaps you should use mediainfo (http://mediaarea.net/en-us/MediaInfo/Download/Windows) to confirm the audio/video codecs in your .mpg file.
MikeBob wrote:
As to DLNA, I copied various mp4's to my N104 and the Tivo only could see the mpg's (The mp4's don't even show up in the list).
That's *precisely* the problem I'm having (also with an N104). The MP4s play when I push them onto the TiVo from the PC (and the speed and filesize indicates that they weren't transcoded in the process), so I don't think there's anything wrong with the MP4 files, but the TiVo can't find and pull them from the ReadyNAS even if I put them in the same directory as the .TiVo files.
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