Has anyone had any success doing this, whether using the MythTV transcoding option, or some Linux tools outside of MythTV, or (gasp) Windows-based tools?

My front end doesn't have the ability to play back the HD3000 recordings without severe stuttering from within MythTV. I'd be OK with transcoding down to something that is more playable by my frontend until either performance improves, XvMC is fixed, or I get a new frontend.

My initial attempts at transcoding with some Windows tools like Gordian Knot have been disappointing... asynch sound and fairly bad quality, compared to some of the transcoded HDTV files I've seen, which are quite nice even at about 704x400 resolution.

Thanks.

I've had fairly mixed success at this task as well. In my case, I'd like to convert some HDTV shows down to 720x480 and record them onto DVD so I can watch them on normal TVs not connected to Myth. I was able to make one such DVD by using Nero's toolkit. I tried it on another file and it failed to complete. I think the problem is that these HDTV shows are in "transport stream" format (MPEG2-TS).

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I finally had some success with transcoding, both to a MPEG2 file and to an AVI from that. I also found that the first step in the process--creating a MPEG2 file from the transport stream that is free of errors and maintains audio sync--resulted in a 720p file that, to my surprise, xine played back without breaking a sweat.

Anyhow, the programs are Windows-based and some cost actual money (!), but given the amount of time I spend messing with things like ProjectX that didn't work for me, I was happy to be rid of the headaches.

http://eswrite.50megs.com/hdtv2dvd.html