[mythtvnz] Freeview in SD?

[Wade Maxfield]

Jason Haar wrote:
> Steven Mulvay wrote:
>> Hi all, 
>> Is it possible to get Freeview in SD, or is it only avaliable in HD?
>>
> 
> I was wondering the same thing. I'm a tight so-and-so and my nice 
> VIA-based frontend is not fit for retirement yet - but there's no way I 
> can play anything non-MPEG2 on it (VIA board have built-in MPEG2 
> decoders - but otherwise have "slow" CPUs).
> 
> Wondering out loud, could I transcode HD content down to MPEG2 (my 
> backend is Intel dual core) - so that it would play nicely on the weak 
> frontend? Could I possibly even do it "lossless"? i.e. take a 2G HD 
> program and convert it into a 30G MPEG2 version? Backend disk is cheaper 
> than below-TV real estate ;-)
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Jason
>

The VIA MPEG2 acceleration only works for video up to around 1024x768 
from memory (or something similar - definitely not HD).  So you'd have 
to scale the frame size while transcoding. In which case it might be 
better to just record the SD version.

  - Wade