After a good 24 hours of compressing files, as mentioned below, I now have MI-5: Season 2 ready to be served up across the network. After using the computer in another room to test the shares, I wasn't too impressed with the compression. I have all of the settings the same (most notably the 85% target quality in AutoGK), yet the file sizes don't change too much. Viva La Bam episodes weigh in at about 480 megs a piece, yet they're only 20 minutes long while 20 minute long Seinfeld episodes are about 230 megs in size. What doesn't make sense to me is how the MI-5 episodes come in right around 500 megs a piece - they're 60 minutes long. So we have 60 minute episodes at 500 megs a piece while Viva La Bam 20 minute episodes are about 480 megs. Now, I realize that different encoding methods will produce different file sizes based on the 85% target quality, but this is kind of annoying. Luckily, I haven't invested too much time into the project and the ripping can be done again quite easily, but I'm not sure of the way I want to go. I think I want to stick with XviD encoding, however, it'd be nicer if I could get a set size per minute (e.g. every 20 minutes takes up about 400 megs) - so Viva La Bam would be 400, Seinfeld would be 400 and MI-5 would be 1.2 gigs. I guess I still have some testing to do and I might do it after MI-5: Season 1 finishes encoding, but we'll see how they turn out size and quality wise.

The problem I'm running into here is that AutoGK was made primarily for movie compression and while it does work with episodic compression, there are problems as mentioned above. I really would like to stream this to another computer, hooked up to a tv, to see how it looks exactly. I just need to run some CAT5 into the den and get my MAME computer up and running again and I should be able to see how it would look through any other media center PC. As it stands now, I can probably take my old server computer (which had a hard drive die), throw in a new hard drive (I have a spare 20 gig sitting around), throw in the TV-SERVE hard drive and hook that up as a dedicated media server (copy over my MP3s as well) - thereby freeing up my computer here for regular use.

Plans (for my reference) - get server computer working and rechristen as TV SERVER. Get MAME computer working and rechristen as MCE in den with CAT5 running to it (as the previous MAME computer, it already has S-Video TV outs and the new TV in the den is ready to receive said output. Upgrade home network. Pre-N networking would be awesome as it would make it much easier to stream video without having to use CAT5. As it stands now, the wireless network is pretty weak and unable to handle full-on video streaming. Buy an Xbox, modchip & remote to convert to another MCE...

URL: Spooks - Episode Guide - TV Tome