The Right Format?

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live & Live Plus
1

Guys hoping someone can help me out with this, I’ve been trying to work it out for weeks.   I’ve read numerous sites but I never seem to find the difinitive answer, or at least one that gives me a great result.

 I’ve got a WD TV Live that I want to play my home video footage on.  I capture the footage from a Sony camera in DV format and edit it in Pinnacle Studio.  I know the LIVE doesn’t play DV files (although this would make life so much easier) so what format should I be saving the edited file in.   Its really the specifics that I’m getting stuck on.   I’ve tried MPEG2 and DiVX but the quality on my TV is nowhere near the quality of the original AVI(DV) file.  The TV is a relatively new Samsung LCD HD.

Here is the info of the original captured file:

General
Complete name          : E:\Video\to do\25-12-08 Christmas Day.avi
Format                           : AVI
Format/Info                   : Audio Video Interleave
Format profile               : OpenDML
File size                          : 6.33 GiB
Duration                         : 29mn 57s
Overall bit rate               : 30.2 Mbps

Video
Format                           : Digital Video
Codec ID                        : dvsd
Codec ID/Hint                : Sony
Duration                         : 29mn 57s
Bit rate                            : 28.7 Mbps
Width                              : 720 pixels
Height                             : 576 pixels
Display aspect ratio     : 4/3
Frame rate mode          : Constant
Frame rate                      : 25.000 fps
Standard                         : PAL
Resolution                      : 24 bits
Colorimetry                     : 4:2:0
Scan type                        : Interlaced
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)         : 2.767
Stream size                     : 6.00 GiB (95%)

Audio
Format                                           : PCM
Format settings, Endianness      : Little
Format settings, Sign             : Unsigned
Codec ID                                   : 1
Codec ID/Hint                           : Microsoft
Duration                                    : 29mn 57s
Bit rate mode                           : Constant
Bit rate                                      : 1 536 Kbps
Channel(s)                              : 2 channels
Sampling rate                         : 48.0 KHz
Resolution                               : 16 bits
Stream size                             : 329 MiB (5%)
Interleave, duration                : 1000 ms (25.00 video frames)
Interleave, preload duration     : 1000 ms

thanks

2

Have you searched the forum for information on files and codecs?  I’ve seen some threads on different files and codecs being used with some success.  Also, you might want to consider different types of software, maybe freeware.

3

Try converting your video to an AVI using “Alltoavi” (link below) - This will put it into a standard XVid file that play perfectly on my WD TV Live. Make sure to set the output to XVid- while I’m sure the player plays Divx, Xvid is a much more refined codec.

http://alltoavi.sourceforge.net/

1 Like
4

For video  h.264 and audio AC3, put all of that in a MKV file.

5

Thanks for the feedback guys.   I tried AllToAVI but for some reason it would hang halfway through the conversion.  I’ve found another program call Handbrake that looks pretty easy to use.   The settings are the key to any of this encoding and I guess that’s just a matter of try it out.

6

Well it all depends on what you intend to do with your files really. It’s basically a tradeoff between encoding time, filesize, and compatibility. If you want your encodes to be playable almost anywhere then you’d need to use an encoder supported by almost any media player (like XviD), however the file sizes will be bigger than they need to be. If compatibility with older devices is not an issue then use x.264, with Handbrake, MeGui etc… For audio you can encode to Mp3 or AAC.