Help Required Do any boxes have the option of recording in 576p for SD channels?

[AaronZ]

Hi, I'm curious if any box has the option to record satellite/LNB to USB in 576p instead of 576i? I currently have an Openbox V8S which I got super cheap and it records fine. It dumps the stream to the USB and doesn't encode I'm assuming since its probably too slow to do realtime compression, so regardless of TV output resolution, it dumps the original resolution, however when recording a SD channel (576i) and copying it to PC, it looks pretty bad with its interlacing. I'm wondering if there's any box that can simply line double a feed and dump it for 576p since its not too demanding compared to 1080i. I know there's deinterlacing methods but still would like to know if any box out there can line double/force progressive on SD. I know when you're watching a channel/recording the box is then deinterlacing/upscaling the image.

In addition I noticed the GT Combo has a USB3 port (among other boxes) with support for NTFS disk file systems, does this also allow for one large file to be recorded as opposed to the V8S which splits recordings into 1GB chunks (and only supports FAT32 drives)? Thanks.

 

[ozumo]

I doubt it, most receivers record the transport stream to preserve the as-broadcast image quality with no extra processing or space requirements. You could use an external recording device which allows you to set the video format, but it will use more space or sacrifice picture quality. Much better to use a deinterlacing method that suits your preference. VLC has many options and can be set to default to one method when interlaced video is played.

If you were able to record a receiver's hardware video scaler output directly the file size would be huge.

I thought the V8S supported NTFS but have never tried it. You should be simple to stitch .ts files together using FFmpeg without re-encoding. You can also use FFmpeg to convert recorded transport streams into whatever format you desire using the command line.

 

[AaronZ]

Yeah I was testing different interlace methods since I wasn't entirely satisfied with yadif, one deinterlacer I learnt of was bwdif, gives pretty good results for TV content, I dont mind converting them with ffmpeg, just thought it would save me a step. Thanks anyway.

Its weird because FAT32 has a 4GB file limit, not 1GB, so not sure why it does those size chunks.

 

[ozumo]

Try bob or linear to preserve motion. Also check your display mode is set to 50hz.