[mythtv-users] Problems with transcode

[rwhittak3 at adelphia.net]

I'm still having problems ripping DVDs at less than perfect quality, but I made some progress troubleshooting last night.

I was glad to see a new build in my latest "apt-get install transcode" (0.6.12-4), and was hoping some of my problems were resolved, unfortunately it was not the case.

first off, I had to create a link from /var/tmp/transcode-root/usr/lib/transcode to /usr/lib/transcode - for some reason transcode demands that it finds the appropriate shared libraries in that bizarre location.

Next, I noticed in /usr/lib/transcode that encode_xvid.so was a symbolic link to encode_xvid2.so.  This was causing transcode to be unable to initialize the encoder.  I changed this link to point to encode_xvid4.so and I was able to successfully transcode to xvid!

Unfortunately, there are some quirks.  A "Perfect" rip works perfectly (.vob file).  an "Excellent" quality rips complese successfully, but the video is flipped vertically - interesting way to watch a movie.  "Good" quality rips seem to work fine.  I haven't checked the other quality settings yet.

I also tried to transcode to divx, unfortunately libdivxencore.so is unavailable - it doesn't seem to be installed through the apt-get process described in Jarod's guide (at least with the latest available packages).

Any more help is greatly appreciated!

Richard whittaker