[mythtv-users] Seek table rebuilding for MPEG-2 broken in 0.18.1, alas

[Yeechang Lee]

The downside of having 1.8TB of mostly-HDTV MythTV recordings [1] is
manually rebuilding the recording database after a total disk crash of
the MythTV system [2]. Thank you, Greg Froese, for writing
myth.rebuilddatabase.pl; without you I'd still be mystified as to the
proper SQL commands for insertingn one, let alone all, of the orphaned
.nuv files into the newly-reinstalled MythTV system. Greg's script, as
rudimentary as it is, even writes the entries into the system in
exactly the intuitively "right" order, making both corrections (as
long as you haven't entered the Description field yet) and
interruptions/continuations easy. (I did make a simple, yet to me
obvious, patch, of making "" instead of "Unknown" the default entries
for $guess_subtitle and $guess_description.)

However, I can't figure out how to rebuild the seek tables for the
newly-reinserted past two months' worth of programs. I've tried both
'mythcommflag --video xyz.nuv' and 'mythcommflag --rebuild' and
neither changes the status quo [3]. Note that I get all my programs in
MPEG-2 (whether over the air or from FireWire), and
<URL:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/136205>
implies that seek table rebuilding for MPEG-2 is currently broken? Is
this correct? (And, in fact,
<URL:http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Release_Notes_-_0.19> and
<URL:http://www.mail-archive.com/mythtv-dev@mythtv.org/msg15495.html>
give me hope in this area. But even if so, I'm still looking at
dozens, maybe hundreds, of hours of rebuilding!)

[1] About 230 .nuv files = about 7.8GB per recording = about an hour
per recording, which sounds right given that I have a mix of movies,
hour dramas, and half-hour comedies and nature specials.

[2] Although I keep snapshots taken every four hours going back
*years* for my most important personal files (mail, journal entries,
etc.), I never bothered to finish setting up something similar for my
MythTV database. I also made the additional cardinal errors of keeping
the database on the same drive partition as the Linux system
itself. In the two months I've had this system (This brings up a
question: How important is freezing any snapshots I take of the
database? I am no longer running LVM on the MythTV system and so each
snapshot would be in media res of the running MySQL; obviously in an
ideal world I'd be shutting down the database for the snapshot but
that's not going to be possible.)

[3] For those fortunate enough to have never experienced seek table
issues with their recordings, the symptoms are a) erratic and usually
totally-wrong end times, b) fast forwards, rewinds, and timepoint
jumps that either jump the wrong time amounts or take seemingly
forever if they do, and c) bookmarks that take a long, long time to
get to (with no guarantees of correct times) on playback.

-- 
Yeechang Lee <ylee at pobox.com> | +1 650 776 7763 | San Francisco CA US