I have an HDTV card that captures broadcast television as an MPEG-2
transport stream.  (It is the HD-3000 from pchdtv.com.)  I am using
this card on a Debian Linux system.  My question is, how can I
transcode this content for burning onto a DVD?

I have posted a 10-second sample of 720p content at
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~nr/clip10.m2t

Notes:
  * The streams in question are 16:9 content at either 720p or 1080i
  * Mplayer knows how to play the streams; other players do not.
    For example, xine routinely dumps core.
  * I know how to get mencoder to convert this content to mpeg2 video
    using the options 
       -oac lavc  -vc ffmpeg12,mpeg12, -of mpeg -ovc lavc
       -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:acodec=mp2
  * Transcode will accept the files on input, but the video it produces
    is full of garbage and the colors are bad.
  * I am aware of the any2vob shell script written by Rick Harris, but
    because it relies on transcode, it produces bad video for my inputs.

Things I do not know and would like to know:
  * Exactly how I should scale down the video for viewing on DVD
  * Whether I need to introduce black bars to account for overscan, and if so,
    how to do this.
  * How to set the exported 'aspect flag' to tell the DVD player that the content
    on the disk is intended to be displayed using a 16:9 aspect ratio.
    (transcode has an option for this, but so far as I can tell, mencoder does not)

I bet the first two problems can be solved using exactly the right
parameters to the -vf scale and -vf expand options, but what are they?


The ideal answer will give me command-line options that I can give to
mencoder to produce a .mpg file that I can then pass to dvdauthor,
burn onto DVD, and view on an ordinary television.  I am hopeful for
an answer that will solve my problem in one pass of one program, so I
don't have to wait all day to transcode.  But any answer that solves
my problem on linux will be quite acceptable.

Ok here are a few apps that should help!!

Transcoding
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vcr
http://linux.bytesex.org/xawtv/
http://nvrec.sourceforge.net/

Apps for encoding the raw video files (that you just transcoded with
one of the following apps):
http://www.xvid.org/ (DivX is probably the best codec, if it is
compatible with your dvd player that is)
http://www.eglug.org/node/905

You might want to consider turning ur linux box into a PVR style
system (like tivo!)
a good little intro:
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2003/11/13/linux_pvr.html

Hope that helps.

Hi,

I think your best bet is to start by re-muxing to a program stream,
not re-encoding, to a ps (I think you are re-encoding in your mencoder
example above, and I don't think you need to).  I've had good luck so
far using videolan client to take a ts and make a ps out if it.  You
can either do this with the "wizard" and tell it to transcode with
dummy audio and video using mpeg-ps as the destination, or you can use
a command line like:

vlc -v input_file.ts --sout '#standard{mux=ps,url=output.ps,access=file}'

Assuming that there aren't many problems with the input ts, the
output.ps should work with whatever application you'd like to use to
transcode.

-Jean