[mythtv] Automated Transcoding Suggestions

[Paul Thompson]

I am going to be doing a little MythTV/nuvexport related coding soon and 
I thought the folks around here might have some suggestions for me that 
will make my resulting code more reusable by others.

But first, a small amount of background.

I am going to be starting a job soon where I will be traveling during 
the week. However, while travelling I will often be busy until sometime 
in the evening that overlaps with the shows that I often watch on TV.

Hence cometh my MythTV box which I have spent the last couple of weeks 
setting up, which has been lots of fun. MythTV, MythWeb, and nuvexport 
are awesome pieces of work.

I plan to have MythTV record shows for me while I am away, and then (on 
the weekend) either copy them over to my work laptop or burn them to 
CD-RW or DVD +/- RW for later viewing. Well, the big MPEG2s that my 
PVR-250 spits out are an impratical format for copying over to my laptop 
for later viewing.

So I need to transcode them to something like a Xvid. Well, doing that 
with nuvexport works great. However, problem is, that requires an 
interactive ssh session to be open for many hours at a time, which is 
again impractical.

What I am going to do is code up some way to automate this. I don't know 
whether it will involve a shell script, hacking to nuvexport, hacking to 
MythWeb/MythTV, or what.

What I do plan is this:

I am going to come up with some way to flag associate certain Scheduled 
Recordings to be transcoded. I think it would be good to allow different 
transcoding profiles to be created that can be selected as the 
transcoding choice for a particular Scheduled Recording.

Then I am going to hack some way together to cause this transcoding to 
occur. Again, I don't know exactly how I'll implement that.

The more I think about this, the more that I think I might just go ahead 
and hack at MythTV itself. Actually, the more I think about it, the more 
I think that this is a good replacement for the existing automatic 
transcoding capability, which could use improvement.

Anyhow, I will probably start work on this in the next week. I wanted to 
toss this out there on the list because:

   1. I have heard lots of discussions related to this topic.
   2. I'd like to implement a genericly useful implementation
      (not just something that "works for me")

Btw. No offense intended toward anyone concerning existing transcoding 
options - I just need something more.

-- 
Paul Joseph Thompson
captbunzo at squirrelmail.org
AIM/Yahoo/MSN IM: Captain Bunzo
ICQ Number: 38801719