[mythtv-users] Question regarding MythArchive and Burning

Rod Smith mythtv at rodsbooks.com
Fri Dec 7 20:46:45 UTC 2007


On Friday 07 December 2007 04:56:18 David Watkins wrote:
> On 06/12/2007, Adam Branaugh <abranaugh at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I am buring the dvd right now and i turned useSyncOffset to false.  I
> > will let you know if that fixed it.
>
> Why not create an iso and see if it's fixed in there (mplayer and xine
> will both play iso's), before burning, and possibly wasting, a DVD?

I learned early on to *ALWAYS* do this! MythArchive is a useful tool, but its 
failure rate is rather high -- probably in the 25% range for me. Issues 
include audio sync problems and flat-out truncated recordings (45 minutes in, 
10 minutes out). I've even got a symbolic link in my videos area that points 
permanently to the mythburn.iso file in the archive area. That way, I don't 
even need to move or copy the image file when I'm done; I just go into 
MythVideo and check it out. If it's OK, I burn it; if not, I tweak things and 
try again.

That said, MythArchive seems sensitive to certain types of problems, and it's 
possible that some people will generate problem files a lot whereas others 
won't. MPEG-4 seems prone to producing audio sync problems, for instance. 
Transcoding to MPEG-2 using mencoder can minimize those problems, but this 
sometimes results in truncated videos on the DVD (the mencoder-created file 
plays fine in MythVideo, but dvdauthor chokes on some mencoder-created files 
and the MythArchive scripts ignore this, resulting in a short recording).

-- 
Rod Smith
http://www.rodsbooks.com


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