TiVo Community Forums Archives - Quality Conversion

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Quality Conversion
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Posted by: DougF

A few times, I have recorded something on Best Quality that I would like to save for a while. I'd like to be able to convert the recording to a lesser quality that uses less space.

Posted by: ccwf

This is probably already possible by looping TiVo's outputs back to its inputs and asking TiVo to re-record that looped input at a lower quality.

Posted by: phone1

Although it would certainly work, adding the extra analog-digital conversion using the loopback method might make the finished product pretty poor, and it's time consuming.

I believe there are utilities that can re-compress an MPG file at a lower bit-rate. I don't know about the possibility or praticality of building one of them into TiVo, but AFAIK it would be possible.

Posted by: Dennis Wilkinson

Doing this is software would be possible, but slow (a low-priority process could do this without swamping the other tasks, but MPEG encode is costly, so who knows how long it would take to do this...) You could reduce the bitrate without doing the really costly parts by requantizing (well, quantizing further) but I don't know how much reduction you'd get before things looked really lousy.

The cleanest way to do this, although it would tie the box up (completely!), would be to use the hardware decoder rerouted back into the hardware encoder, keeping the signal digital. It's not very likely that the circuit paths to do this are there on the hardware, though.