[mythtv-users] Commercial cutting & DVD burning

[Ross Campbell]

> After spending a few hours digging thru the archives on this topic, I
> still didn't find any discussion that had concise steps to cutting
> commercials and burning dvd.

I would suggest that you get the latest mythtvburn CVS code - it has
recently introduced  cutlist support code in the web interface and the
backend script calls avidemux to do the cutting - I haven't burned a
CD using the cutlists successfully yet, but I presume I'm close and
I'm tracking CVS code changes.

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=2132
http://mythburn.sf.net/

Since I haven't seen any posts recently about MythTVBurn, I'll provide
a summary of my experience:

I started running MythTVBurn on FC1/mythtv 0.16 - it took some hacking
of the scripts to adjust file locations and I needed to remove some
flags from transcode to get the animated video clips to be not "blue"
and upside down. I had problems with replex so I switched back to
mplex. In the process of getting things working, I upgraded to the
latest ImageMagick, and rebuilt ffmpeg, avifile, avidemux, and
transcode from CVS enabling all options and protocols. This might not
be necessary now with latest packages on FC3.

After some tinkering, I was able to burn DVDs via the web interface
just fine. It (currently) only works with MPEG2 recordings. If your
recordings are transcoded or not MPEG2, you can't burn them directly
to DVD.

My default recording settings only allowed me to fit 1 /12 hours onto
a DVD, so I adjusted my recording bitrate settings down. I can now fit
2 hours onto a dvd. Burning a dvd takes about 30 seconds from the web,
and about 20 minutes to create the dvd.

When I upgraded to MythTV 0.17 - it took some hacking of mythweb to
deal with the new internationalization to get mythtvburn working
again. The CVS code deals with most of that now.

I recently upgraded ImageMagick to the latest version and had to
upgrade dvdauthor to the latest alpha release to fix a problem that
the new ImageMagick created with menu icons.

DVDs created with mythtvburn have mp2 sound, and I've just recently
come to realize that the US DVD standard only supports ac3 sound. Most
cheap DVD players will play the mp2 sound dvds just fine, but some
older and more expensive players won't.


-Ross