[mythtv-users] MythArchive - Aspect Ratio

[Christopher Maines]

> Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2006 22:03:01 +0100
> From: Paul Harrison <mythtv at dsl.pipex.com>

> Its possible I haven't got things quite right in the dvdauthor.xml file
> yet. I did a lot of testing with various files and menu aspect settings
> and everything seemed to be working as I would have expected but to save
> time I used xine to test the created DVDs and not a standalobe DVD player.
>
> On my player there is a button on the remote that takes you back to the
> main menu. I think its labeled 'Top Menu' or something like that. I'll
> take a look at adding a back button on the chapter menu in any case.
>
I'm actually talking about xine here and not a standalone DVD player.
In the cvs mythburn versions I've used (pre-MythArchive), when I hit
the Menu button on my remote I was taken back to the topmost menu and
not the chapter menu which is what is happening now. Consequently,
without a selectable "back button" on the screen, I can't get past the
chapter menu to the topmost menu and have to exit xine and restart in
order to play other videos on the same DVD.

> When you say the menus looked squashed do you have black bars at the top
> and bottom with the menu in the middle? Is it both the main menu and
> chapter menu? If you use the G.A.N.T theme does the intro screen shown
> just before the video plays look OK?
>
The theme that gets burned to DVD looks very much like the samples
images you see when choosing which theme to use. By squashed menus
here, I'm only talking about the thumbnail images themselves. Although
the images do not have black bars at the top or bottom, they are
elongated, or squashed, in a letterbox aspect ratio rather than the
more squarish 4:3 ratio. The image that appears with the G.A.N.T.
themes just before the video plays is also the without black bars and
also elongated. The G.A.N.T.y tan background completely fills the
screen for both the main and chapter menus. The video, when it plays,
looks completely fine.


> > I also had a problem with one of the three burned shows - the audio
> > was ahead of the video by the end, although they started out together.
> > There isn't anything wrong with the show in MythTV. I know this isn't
> > necessarily a mytharchive problem, but I've burned about 150 DVDs
> > using mythburn in mythtv 0.18 and never had this happen before.
> >
> >
>
> Where all the shows from the same source? What type of card? Did you
> cutout commercials?
>
All three shows were from the same source using a PVR-500 card. I had
commercial cutouts on all three.

> If the files are from a PVR-x50 type card you could try changing the
> 'Always Use Mythtranscode'  setting  so it is selected on the
> MythArchive settings pages. That will always run the files though
> mythtranscode --mpeg2 to clean up the timecodes etc. If the file had a
> cut list then it wont make any difference because mythtrancode is used
> to cut the commercials and at the same time it does the timecode fixups.
>
I've always had the 'Always Use Mythtranscode' setting selected
whenever I've used MythArchive. Mythtranscode is the other reason I'm
really keen on getting MythArchive to work. I always hated seeing
tcrequant compress a video in the earlier mythburn because it
calculates the compression factor before the commercials have been cut
out. Do you think upgrading >all< the components that MythArchive uses
to the latest versions would fix this problem? I have actually already
done everything described above again after upgrading to the latest
dvdauthor and ffmpeg, but don't even know if all the other components
are at the latest revisions. (Just to reiterate, I started out with a
fresh install of KnoppMyth R5C7 before upgrading via svn to revision
10600.)

Chris