[mythtv-users] Puzzled by seektables.

[Davide Chiarini]

Hi there,

I'm using mythtv 0.20 on debian, with debianmultimedia packages, on a
box with two dvb cards (one dvb-t, the other dvb-s).

having recently purchased a dvd burner, I began fiddling around with
mytharchive for making some dvd out of my recordings.

first, of course, I'd like to cut out commercials. I have never used
myth's commercial flagging feature, because I wanted to keep cpu usage
down and I heard that it doesn't work very well in Italy, where I
live.

cutting commercials out by hand is ok for me.
so I bring up the editing menu, but unfortunately I'm hit by a 'no
seektables' message, and nothing happens.

so I do some more reading, I find out about mythcommflag and
--rebuild. I try it on some recordings, and they are scanned. I go
into the editing menu, and this time I see the bar at te bottom, and I
can move forward and backward. But when I try to set a cutpoint, the
'no seektables' message comes up again.

After a bit more of searching, I'm beginning to be puzzled about these
'seektables'.
Do they have something to do with the file format? The message means
that a dvb transport stream has no seektable and therefore cannot be
flagged for cutting?
Or is it something about myth? As in 'the file has to be scanned some
way in order to create a  table', which is then used in editing?

I apologize if I'm missing something very obvious, but I couldn't find
anything relevant in myth's docs or even in the mailing lists.

regards,
davide