my procedure

[tuzman]

I have been crusing this board, responding here and there to thread, 
so I thought I would share what I have learned in the hopes to help 
others in this quest. 

I base most of my procedure on Merch's TiVo Page 
http://www.30below.com/~zmerch/tivo/index.cfm

The idea here is extracting a 1 hour video and burning it commerical 
free to a SVCD.

Prereqs:
1. Record all data at TiVo 'High' quality (or at least, that which 
you want to archive)

2. Have a single high-capacity (or your original) A drive in the 
TiVo. Many of the audio-video sync battles I fought was over how 
TiVo saves data across multiple drives. I bought a single 120GB A 
drive from http://www.stores.ebay.com/id=2218147 (an ebay store... 
very good ratings... I had a very good experience). It was 
absolutely plug-and-play. There are of course ways to upgrade your 
TiVo A drive yourself, but either way, I recommend having only 1 
drive in the TiVo.

3. TiVoNet, of course.

4. Proper MPEG codecs on your PC. Another battle I fought was 
trying to determine if the audio and video was really synced or not. 
I would get a video, play it back on my machine, it would not be in 
sync. I would play it on another machine, it would be in sync. I 
finally downloaded PowerDVD trial 
http://www.gocyberlink.com/english/products/product_main.jsp?ProdId=28

With my ATI Radeon 64mb VIVO card, PowerDVD seemed to play darn near 
EVERYTHING i threw at it, streams that media player, ATI's player, 
elecard mpeg player choked on. 

With that in mind, here is what i do:
(all links can be found on Merch's TiVo Page)

1. Use Merch's procedure to get a TYstream from tivo to the PC via 
sendstream/nc.

2. Now, once I have a TY stream (usually about 1.6gb in size for 1 
hour of 'high' quality tivo), I use TyConvert to create an m2v and an 
m2a file. But, what I have noticed is that if I chop off the first 
30 chunks of the ty stream, the rest of the file is in audio/video 
sync. There is something in those first 30 or so that screws up the 
video. In my case, almost every stream I have has commericals in the 
front, so lobbing off that many chunks does not cut off any of the 
show. When using TyConvert, I check 'Don't skip invalid chunks'.

3. After that, I use DVD2AVI to create a d2v file from the m2v file, 
and WinAmp to create a WAV file from the m2a file, and I load both up 
into TMPGENC. I use all of Merch's settings and procedures in 
TMPGEnc with the exception of BITRATE.

4. BITRATE nightmares: Honestly, I think this is something everyone 
needs to play around with on their own to determine the right 
settings. I use 2-pass VBR, avg bitrate 2268, max bitrate 2528, 
minimum bitrate 1160. This results in a set of 5 chapters that have 
a bitrate just over 800mb (usually around 812-815). I have done 5 
videos with these settings, all have worked great.

5. Final step: burning the files. For some reason, my Nero is weird 
in that when I create a SuperVideoCD layout, it doesnt seem to sector 
properly to fit 800mb on a 700mb disc. So I have 90min, 800MB CDRS 
from YesBuy.net that work with Nero and my Plextor 8x4x32 cd-burner 
and play in my Apex 3-disc DVD player. 

HTH,

-Mike "The TuzMan" Tuszynski