[mythtv-users] Burning DVDs

[Andrew Dodd]

Quoting Kendrick Vargas <ken at hudat.com>:

> On Tue, 20 Jan 2004, Malcolm wrote:
> 
> > I realize Mythtv doesn't have burning ability built right in because of
> > legal copyright issues etc. but what can I use to burn DVDs?  Well more
> 
> Is this why it's not built right in? What happens if I wanted to use a
> camcorder or digital camera as a source to bring in videos or pictures via
> firewire and/or usb, and then burn them to CD or DVD? Is that a copyright
> violation? I ask that because I was going to look into getting either a
> digital camera or firewire digital video camera (or both) and getting a
> firewire riser for my Myth box. I was thinking "wow, it'd be cool if myth
> could automatically deal with this media and let me grab the contents.",
> etc...
> 
> So, is that the reason that burning isn't present in myth, or is it
> because noone's had time to work on it?
> 			-peace
I'm pretty sure it's the latter.

I remember seeing a discussion on the subject a while ago, there were no
discussions of copyright issues (If anything, that's more along the lines of
legality of MythDVD linking to libdvdcss - but irrelevant to this subject.)

The primary issues seemed to be how to prioritize the transcoding/burning
process.  On machines doing software encoding, burning and recording can
interfere with each other.  (high CPU from recording could result in a buffer
underrun.)

If you use an ivtv board for recording, burning MythTV files to DVD is childs'
play.  Just remultiplex the MPEG and feed it to dvdauthor.  No scratch space
needed, it can all be done with FIFOs.

Cutting out commercials is a bit harder...  Until recently there was no reliable
solution for cutting out commercials from MPEG video under Linux, both GOPchop
and avidemux would occasionally sync to bogus MPEG audio headers at cutpoints. 
avidemux2 JUST had a patch committed to CVS in the past day to fix this.  (In
fact I don't think my latest patch is even in yet.)

When NOT burning MPEG recorded via an ivtv card...  I don't even want to think
about it.  Every MPEG2 encoding solution I've found under Linux was
sloooooooooooow.  :(