[mythtv-users] Using MythTV files remotely

[Timothy.Weaver at at.redbull.com]

I have scanned the entire history of the mailing list and did not see
anyone using MythTV the way I intend to use it. As I am currently living in
Europe without any possibility of satellite or other form of English TV, I
decided to setup a MythTV box in the USA where I can remotely control it to
record programs, transfer them to my computer in Europe and watch TV. This
has some interesting implications.

First some background. I have a PVR-250 in a 2.5Ghz machine with 512MB
connected to a cable modem. Upstream on the cable modem is around 12KBps.
This is an important point because my real issue is in finding the optimum
settings to give me a decent quality file at the lowest possible size. I
accept that I need to balance quality versus file size. I will be
transferring the files in the background and will not stream or directly
access the files, therefore I can accept slightly bigger files in the
interest of decent quality.

I have successfully setup the September 16 tarball of ivtv and CVS of
MythTV remotely and can capture video just fine using "cat /dev/video0 >
video.mpg". I also have xmltv and MythWeb running and can record shows, so
I should be able to handle the administration fine from Europe. As I have a
straight coax into the PVR-250, I did not have to worry about lirc (thank
god).

I set MythTV's Default profile to record at 720x480 with audio sampling at
32000. I then set the Transcode profile to 480x320 with audio sampling at
32000 (as I read the mailing list, the audio sampling must match).

My questions are:

1) Can anyone recommend which settings in MythTV's Transcode profile I
should use to obtain decent quality for a file size I could live with
downloading?

2) Is anyone still experiencing lockups with the mythtranscode
functionality? I need tor research more, but I think this is the cause of
box lockups I am having.

3) I will be viewing the files on a Windows box. As PVR-250 encodes
straight to MPEG-2, I can download and watch the MPEG-2 files fine.
However, the transcoded files to MPEG-4 give me a codec error on Windows
Media Player and Intervideo WinDVD.  Is there any way I can confirm the
transcode is working properly and also any way to indicate when the
transcode is completed on a given recording?

4) Is there any easy way to identify the connection between the file name
used on the file system and the actual contents of the file? I know it is
the time and date in the name. I know I can look it up in the mysql tables.
But I am looking for something more glamorous and don't want to reinvite
the wheel .

5) Finally, as I have no need for the LiveTV function, can anyone confirm
whether the LiveTV functionality is doing anything when I am not running
the frontend (which I will rarely ever do, but I can do it for
administration purposes over a Xvnc connection).

Thanks for any help in advance.