Description

  This torrent was uploaded from www.TheBox.bz (signup is open and free) - the home of all British TV 

Olympic Badminton - Day 9 PM 


This is the final badminton broadcast of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and features 
the Mixed Pairs and Men's Singles gold medal matches. 

Astonishingly, no-one capped this event for TheBox; my source material for this 
cap came from the BBC iPlayer web-stream. 

There are two different methods to get round the copy protection on iPlayer. 
Neither method was possible here, because iPlayer has been set to refuse all 
requests to download the file directly. The streaming protocol used is Adobe 
Flash 9 - it hasn't yet been reverse engineered, so there are no utilities to grab 
the files straight to hard disk 

I connected my graphics card by composite video to an analogue PAL capture 
device, and started running iPlayer in full-screen mode. 

The BBC compressed the file to a very low bit rate, to allow it to be streamed 
in real time over UK ADSL-1 broadband. 

Do not expect the sound and picture quality to be any better than a fairly 
mediocre VHS-rip. 


I tried a range of different bit rates for the second pass transcode, and found 
that 800-950 kb/s gave the best results. Across this range, the quantiser values 
were all 3 and 4; below it, I started getting frames with Q=5, which were no good 
with such compromised source material. 



Sunday 17 August 2008, 1.00 pm - 3.00 pm 

BBCi Freeview 3 
streamed on BBC iPlayer until 7.00am on Sunday 24 August 2008. 

Filesize........ : 658.74 MB (674,554 KB) (690,733,056 bytes) 
Runtime....... : 1:54:27.56 (171,689 frames) 
Video Codec : XviD 1.1.3 
..................... : constant quantiser, CQ = 4. 
Video Bitrate : 666 kb/s 
Audio Codec : MP3 (LAME 3.97) 
Sample Rate : 48 kHz, joint stereo 
Audio Bitrate : 128 kb/s CBR 
frame Size... : 608x352 (1.73:1 = 19:11) 


I also tried transcoding at CQ = 3, which gave the following statistics: 

Filesize........ : 903.69 MB (925,384 KB) (947,593,216 bytes) 
Video Bitrate : 966 kb/s 

It appeared slightly sharper, but only because it contained a little ringing 
from my intermediate MPEG-2 capture: there was no real improvement. 



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