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radarman wrote:

resedit wrote:

I think the issue is the torrent client.

I use transmission for gui and the python client for cli.

They don't do the nasty spyware things that many of the crap windows P2P clients do. They get the data file, period.
I don't find exotic codecs on multimedia served by bt - I find divx for standard definition and h.264+ac3 for high def.

I'm actually not using it that much anymore, much of what I'm interested in is free via On Demand, and doesn't have the crap artifacts and audio sync problems from the encoding noobs who use some crap encoder and try to be first to publish instead of taking their time doing a quality two-pass encoding and viewing the file before they upload.

The problem with torrents is that the quality ranges from pure crap to gold, only it follows the rule of 90% of everything being crap. Unless you are on a private tracker, the odds of getting what you want is pretty close to 10% or less.

That said, I find I don't have a reason to use trackers much, anymore. Hulu serves as a handy stand-in when I miss an episode of most things - since catching up on missed ep's was about the only reason I was using them.

I'm on a private tracker site, the quality is usually pretty good but it's better ratio if you wait a week as nuked torrents are not terribly uncommon (where a poorly encoded version is uploaded first). When it happens too often they'll ban submissions from a certain scene, but it still happens.

It seems to be more common with standard definition torrents than high definition, I think the issue is that the good experienced encoders are all high def and don't bother with standard def.

What I tend to do now is grab the high def and if I want to watch it on my TV (standard def) I transcode the high def myself. Means a bigger download time plus re-encoding time, but it works out better, especially since I can target a 700MB file size for CD burning instead of the scene standard 350MB.

For playing on my puter, I transcode to mp4 - copying the h.264 so no re-encode is necessary, and resampling the audio from AC3 to stereo WAV to encode as AAC w/o me needing a dolby AC3 decoder (there is an open source one, but considering I don't have surround sound anyway, I'll wait for fluendo to produce one - they have one, but are working on licensing issues with dolby before they can distribute it).

Another benefit to transcoding to mp4 is I can watch it on my laptop over the network via flash, using flowplayer which supports full screen mode (free version of flowplayer works fine, the logo is not present during playback  - only before/after). You do have to run qt-faststart on it so it streams, that's in the ffmpeg contrib stuff (something about the MOOV atom being at the beginning of the file - tag the mp4 before you run qt-faststart as tagging often relocates the MOOV atom to the wrong spot for streaming)

Here's the script I use:

#!/bin/bash

base=`echo $1 |sed -e s?"\.mkv$"?""?`

vidTrack=`mkvinfo ${base}.mkv |grep "Track type" |grep -n "video" |cut -d":" -f1`
audTrack=`mkvinfo ${base}.mkv |grep "Track type" |grep -n "audio" |cut -d":" -f1`

mkvextract tracks ${base}.mkv ${vidTrack}:${base}.h264
mkvextract tracks ${base}.mkv ${audTrack}:${base}.ac3

a52dec -o wavdolby ${base}.ac3 > ${base}.wav
rm -f ${base}.ac3
normalize-audio ${base}.wav


ffmpeg -i ${base}.h264 -i ${base}.wav -map 0:0 -map 1:0 -vcodec copy -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -y -f mp4 ${base}.mp4

rm -f ${base}.h264 ${base}.wav

normalize-audio may be debian/ubuntu specific, under CentOS I built normalize from source and the command was just normalize.

My h.264/aac/divx/wma/etc. decoders are from fluendo and interestingy, my h.264 decoder does better in Linux than QuickTime does in Windows on faster hardware with more RAM. Apple's decoder really sucks on Windows.

Don't buy their DVD player though if you use Linux, it does do AC3 but not through a gstreamer plugin and it sucks, lot of complaints. You are better off playing DVDs through xine or vlc on Linux (which also will play .mkv w/ AC3 but I prefer to use gstreamer totem)

The gstreamer plugins they produce though rock.