[mythtv-users] mythdvd & transcode

[thor]

On Friday 26 November 2004 12:15 pm, Bill Toner wrote:
> I'm having a bit of trouble with mythdvd rip settings. I've got a vob file
> from my Spiderman 1 DVD that has no sound, using the "perfect" quality
> setting, but the video seems to have worked.

 It is extremely unlikely that there is no sound in the ripped perfect file. 
Perfect essentially copies the VOB right of the disc and preserves all the 
audio tracks.

 What is more likely is that there are mutliple audio tracks, and one of them 
is silent (or is in ac3/Dolby that you can't hear). Trying changing the audio 
track setting in your player (in mplayer, you can fiddle with the -aid flag, 
and -v will show all the available audio tracks).

> Trying to make an "excellent" 
> quality rip gives me this output in my mtd.log file:
>
> transcode command will be: transcode -i
> /var/lib/mythdvd/temp/Spiderman/vob/ -g 720x480 -f 0,1 -M 2 -V -y xvid,null
> -o /dev/null --print_status 20 --color 0 -R 1,twopass.log
>

 That's the first pass of a two pass process (output is to /dev/null), which 
is used by transcode to build a log file. Audio is thrown away on the first 
pass because it is of no use. On the second pass, the log file is used to 
optimize the actual encoding. 

> How do I get it to output to xvid4 instead of just xvid?

 -y xvid will use xvid4. It is very unlikely that you have any xvid libraries 
on your machine other than libxvidcore.so.4.0.

>
> Searching the net has given me a couple very vague hints that I can make
> any transcode setting using the transcode table. The README-database file
> has some very vague hint about this, but reading the mentioned dbcheck.cpp
> file wasn't very helpful to me as I don't know SQL, and my C is pretty darn
> rusty. (No, I never got to learn C++) Is there a "Transcode Settngs for
> Mythtv via SQL tables For Dummies" HOWTO out there someplace that google
> can't find for me? It's just that I'm having to cope with learning Linux,
> Gentoo in particular this round, Apache, php, ivtv, nvidia, xorg.conf,
> alsa, ssh, samba, cygwin (for the heck of it for remote access to this myth
> box as well as another gentoo box destined for more productive things),
> lirc (which is the other things that doesn't seem to work yet), and SQL, as
> well as whatever other things I can't name at the moment. It's a bit much
> to soak up all at once, and there doesn't seem to be any real documentation
> for "the rest of us" about ripping DVDs in mythdvd via transcode and
> controlling the settings to a significant degree...
>

 The great problem with transcode is that changing one setting tends to bugger 
up all the others. That's why there's no slick Myth dialog to twiddle all the 
transcode dials. 

 If you find a set of transcode settings that you like, send them to the 
mailing list. If they make sense, some one can insert them into the code that 
makes the transcode tables relatively easily.

- thor