What’s the highest-quality way to get H.264 WTV 1080p rips (avc1, 24fps, bitrates approx 8K-10K) to Tivo using pyTivo?

I’ve been letting pyTivo transcode them to mpeg, where the ffmpeg parameters are:
-vcodec mpeg2video -b 20971k -maxrate 30000k -bufsize 8388k -acodec ac3 -ab 448k -ar 48000 -f vob

Lately I’ve read that pyTivo can push H.264. Would I get a higher-quality end result if I pushed the WTV H.264 files instead? If so what ffmpeg parameters would I need?

H.264 must be level 4.1 or lower which *may* not be the case for Blu Ray rips. Also, container must be mpeg4 and audio must be AC3 or AAC and can’t exceed the specs noted on that page. i.e. Tivo decoder supports only a narrow range of specs which may not be suitable for a lot of Blu Ray rips, so you may be better off just using the transcoding method you are using now.

Related Articles