[mythtv-users] Using MythTV as a non-TV recording device

Kichigai Mentat kichigai at comcast.net
Fri Dec 23 03:44:13 EST 2005


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On Dec 21, 2005, at 21.46, Ryan Green wrote:

> The place of my employment currently has a setup where presentations
> are shot with a camera, and then currently recorded onto a VCR, and
> then captured from that tape onto a Computer for DVD. Currently, this
> takes us too much time and effort, and we'd like to go directly from
> camera to MPEG-2, and then record that with external software (doesn't
> have to be on the mythbox). We have a Hauppage PVR-250 which has an
> mpeg-2 encoder lying around, so we're thinking of dropping that into a
> box along with mythtv. Then, the files would be accessed over the
> local network for burning with Adobe Premiere.
As some one who has worked with video editing before, let me tell you  
this is a bad idea.

First, MythTV was intended to record stuff from TV. If you're doing  
this in Linux, just go cat /dev/video0 >file.ts and you'll save  
yourself a lot of effort.

Second, editing videos in MPEG-2 is never a good idea. In video  
processing, having to decompress MPEG-2 is just not something you  
have the economy to do, unless you have multiple gigabytes of RAM and  
a Godly amount of processing power.

Third, editing with MPEG-2 means loss of quality. You lose quality on  
the first encoding, then you lose more quality on the second encoding.

Fourth, you don't want to store this on the network. At least, not  
for video editing. A 300 GB Maxtor hard disk at the local Office Max  
is going for $99. I'd plunk down the $99 for that hard disk.

If you're going to be serious about this, spend the money on a DV  
cam, and a good hard disk. I've produced a fair number of videos  
before. Early on, I was working from MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 sources, and  
later I moved to DV. The difference in both quality and processing  
speed was night and day.
>
> I'm not going to be recording TV with this at all, just programming a
> record button onto our AMX system and hooking it up to the computers
> serial port. How should I go around this? Is mythtv even the right
> choice?

Well, like I said, an easier way to do this (if you are still going  
to go about using MPEG-2 as your capture medium) is just to go cat / 
dev/video0 >file.ts and avoid the whole overkill project of  
installing MythTV.

"I said I was smart, I never said I was mature."
- --Ivan Kowalenko

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